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RECURSE Workshop - Report

Digital Repositories Workshop

Repository Curation Service Environments (RECURSE) Workshop

National e-Science Centre, Edinburgh

Hosted by the 4th International Digital Curation Conference


1 December 2008

The RECURSE workshop saw 27 experts and user-community representatives participated at this workshop which offered a selection of presentations focussing on issues from a range of perspectives and communities, as well as a fruitful roundtable discussion which focussed on the challenges faced by digital repositories.

Report by Nicholas Ferguson, OGF Europe

Results from user community surveys gave insight into user needs.Graham Pryor, University of Edinburgh, highlighted results of a study by the CARMEN project had which found that national data management strategies are unlikely to succeed without restructuring in funding/support to informatics-dependent initiatives. Furthermore, Pryor highlighted that researchers focus upon data to enable scientific endeavour, therefore the integrity of data must be preserved whilst facilitating the evolution of metadata. David Giaretta, STFC, shared a number of results from a study by PARSE.Insight which was aimed at funders, publishers and data managers. Results included the importance for respondents of the re-use of data and related benefits.

Francoise Genova, Strasbourg Astronomical Data Centre, highlighted how data centres have been instrumental in providing on-line data & services which have changed the way astronomers do research and has been critical for the development of ‘multi-wavelength’ astronomy. She also stressed the importance of listening to the needs of user communities when developing DRs and related standards. Nicholas Ferguson, OGF-Europe, urged user communities to synergise and converse with standards groups such as OGF, in order to ensure that standards are developed that truly reflect the needs of users, while David Martin, IBM & OGF, highlighted the importance and benefits of standards, offering examples of OGF standards from which DRs can benefit from including Storage Resource Management (SRM). Manjula Patel, UKOLN, discussed the progress of the eCrystals project and made a number of recommendations for data curation and preservation including the development of a preservation and curation strategy and formal policies to indicate levels of service such as deposit, ingest, validation and dissemination.

Community supported sustainability of DRs is important with further collaboration with education institutions dependent on the development of value-add tools to make DRs an invaluable tool for all researchers and scientists. An example of this was given by Richard Sinnot, University of Glasgow who offered insight into the importance to users, and complexities of single sign-on systems. The importance of recognising the differences in how different domains treat the generation, use and curation of data was highlighted, as well as the how the terms repository and community may be interpreted differently by different communities.

A number of areas for development were identified as being of mutual benefit for both repositories and eScience:

  • Improved tools for the synthesis analysis, visualisation of data
  • Authorisation
  • Top level Metadata frameworks

Results from this workshop will go towards the a more technically-focussed follow-up workshop at OGF25 March 2-6 2009, Catania, Sicily. The aim of the workshop will be to develop and OGF Community group dedicated to Digital Repositories and to identify standards that can be developed for the advantage of Digital Repositories.

Presentations