Orbital is a project which aims to create a brand new way to store and manage your research data. We’re still in the early stages of planning at the moment, but here’s what to expect.

Standards Compliant, Benchmarked and Ready To Go

The Orbital project is being built around accepted standards and benchmarks for open data, archiving and resource data management. From both a technical and policy standpoint Orbital will be designed from the ground up to slot straight into existing best practices.

Come One, Come All

What works for one research group won’t work for another, which is why the Orbital project involves teams from across the University of Lincoln. Developers, researchers, security analysts, industry experts and end users come together from Research and Enterprise, ICT, the Library, Engineering, and the Centre for Educational Research and Development, to implement the pilot infrastructure. Orbital will be fully documented with a programme of supporting workshops and one-to-one tutorials.

Think Big Bigger

Your research doesn’t need to be restrained by the systems you use, so Orbital will be ready to scale. A platform designed to withstand multiple failures and ensure rock solid data integrity will support a data management system capable of handling millions of datapoints as quickly as you can generate them. Coupled with near instantaneous backups and blisteringly fast retrieval, Orbital will keep pace with even the biggest of research projects.

Ready, Set, Code

Orbital is being run using Agile development and project management methodologies, meaning that users can see results in days rather than months. Feedback doesn’t go through layers of committees and planning, but instead is given directly to the developers so that a new version of the project outputs can be made and viewed as soon as possible.

Talk Computer To Me

API-first development means that every single piece of the underlying Orbital functionality will be accessible to other computer systems over native, well-defined, machine-level interfaces rather than just the ‘official’ web interface. Let your sensors or surveys load data straight into the Orbital platform, then write your own systems to perform the analysis that you want with direct access to the data you need.

Bring Your Partners

Working closely with the Lincoln School of Engineering and Siemens, Orbital will be designed to understand the nuances and restrictions of commercially sensitive data. With comprehensive individual user security, industry-standard encryption, the ability to control access to data down to the individual data points and a complete audit trail, Orbital will be ready to work with industry partners.

Sharing Made Easy

Your data will be safe with Orbital, but sometimes you want to share it with the world. From simple options for licensing your data to amazingly easy to use output templates and clearly documented RESTful APIs, Orbital makes getting your information out there easier than ever.

All Open

Orbital is planned to be totally open, from our reference implementation platform to the storage core, front-end management interface and sample applications you can pick up the Orbital source code and tweak it to your heart’s content.