Category: Meetings

Team meeting notes: Winding down, tidying up, moving forward

Joss Winn / / Meetings

We had a quick Orbital team meeting this afternoon. Not everyone could attend, but here’s what was reported:

Joss is writing up the final report for JISC and, along with Paul Stainthorp working with the Dean of Research and University Librarian to establish and resource a new ‘Research Information Service’. This service will bring together people, systems, and policy relating to ePrints, the REF, RDM, bibliometrics and scholarly communication. Joss presented this to the JISC MRD Programme meeting on Tuesday. The slides from the conference are below.

Joss and Nick will also be creating a screencast and advocacy materials to explain and promote the work of the project and new Service before the end of April, when the project officially ends.

Nick is working with the DCC on DMPOnline integration into Orbital’s ‘Researcher Dashboard’. He’s also documenting code and generally tidying up before the end of the project. He’s also working with ePrints Services to add a new user permission to allow the Researcher Dashboard to submit work to ePrints “on behalf” of someone else.

Harry has a one month extension to his contract to undertake some work commissioned by Janet, evaluating different storage services. More on that later in April.

Bev and Paul have been working on the upgrade to ePrints and attending to REF work. The data warehouse (‘Nucleus’) developed as part of the Orbital project looks likely to be used as a source of information for the REF, in particular the university staff profiles, which run on top of Nucleus. (Orbital/Nick, along with combined effort from two other JISC projects at Lincoln (Linkey/Alex Bebop/Dale), built a new university staff profile directory. Something that I keep forgetting! My example can be seen here).

RDM training for post-graduates continues each month and similar training for staff is being arranged through HR.

Orbital project team meeting: notes

Paul Stainthorp / / Meetings, Project Management

Here are the notes of the most recent Orbital project team meeting (31 January 2013).

Present: Nick Jackson, Harry Newton, Paul Stainthorp, Joss Winn.

The project team discussed the following development tasks. The aim is for the following to be completed by the end of February 2013:

  • Demonstratable AMS-CKAN–EPrints workflow in Orbital Bridge (a minimal but operational RDM infrastructure);
  • Researcher dashboard to include projects and project metadata;
  • Users able to display and create datasets in CKAN from within Orbital Bridge (N.B. need to check changes to CKAN APIs between versions);
  • Demonstrator using the DataCite test API (until a budget is agreed for use of the live DataCite service);
  • Ability to publish dataset metadata to EPrints Repository, with a complete ‘publish’ UI in Orbital Bridge (to be tested on the University’s upgraded EPrints 3.3 Repository in March) – questions over versioning/locking of deposited metadata to be resolved;
  • Researcher dashboard to include analytics fom EPrints, CKAN, AMS, and bibliometric/citation services – add links to external profiles (Scopus, WoS, ORCID, Google Scholar) in the first instance. ACTION: JW to contact Planning to discuss reporting from the researcher dashboard (also data.lincoln.ac.uk; bibiometrics).

JW presented the Orbital business case to the University Senior Management Team on 14th January 2013. JW to work with the Dean of Research (Lisa Mooney) / Deputy V-c (Ieuan Owen) to discuss ongoing resourcing for RDM.

ICT are undertaking a cloud major scoping study, including RDM storage requirements.

The draft RDM policy is to be presented to the Research & Enterprise committee in April.

NJ, HN and PS are working on the display of RDM training and documentation in Orbital Bridge, with versioned text stored as Markdown in Github. Pages in Orbital can be linked to Github.

The next RDM training for postgraduate students will take place on 6th March 2013. ACTION: PS to embed a calendar feed of training events on the Orbital website.

Upcoming events:

Orbital Team meeting 13-12-12

Joss Winn / / Meetings

Present

Joss
Melanie
Harry
Nick

Apologies

Annalisa
Paul

Previous Actions

  • JW to circulate draft documents for business case and SMT presentation to Orbital team. DONE
  • PS to talk to NJ and HN about ingestion of this content to Bridge. DONE
  • MB to send NJ/HN information on impact recording systems. DONE

Agenda

Policy and Business Case

Business case presentation to SMT has moved to Jan 14th
JW has distributed draft documents for SMT presentation to project team.
Documents & presentation aim to secure the groundwork for a research data management ‘road map’ over next 2 years from end of Orbital. Includes Research Services developer, supporting ePrints, Orbital, bibliometrics, RDM, etc. Also to raise awareness of Data Scientist position.
Action: MB/JW to contact Lisa Mooney regarding review of committee structure.

Training/Documentation

PS and JW met with Mike Neary at Graduate School, with agreement that Orbital would run training workshop with graduates on RDM to refine workshops and documentation. PS has blogged an outline of this training.
Action: PS/MB/JW/AJ to meet regarding training materials.
Joss spoke to Martin Donnelly at the DCC about RDM training and a branded version of DMPOnline. Will arrange a DCC workshop at Lincoln end to February.
ACTION: Joss to contact Martin about requirements for a branded version of DMPOnline.

Technical

Orbital Bridge is ‘Researcher Dashboard’. v0.2 released yesterday. Will collect metrics from ePrints, Scopus, Web of Science, Google Analytics, CKAN, etc.  Provides researcher with overview of their reserch profile and impact. Aggregates metrics for the institution.
ACTION: NJ to discuss bibliometrics with PS/HN
Still waiting for access to the AMS. NJ has met with ICT. Still issues around user permissions. John Bark will talk to Worktribe.
ACTION: NJ to organise conference call with Worktribe/ICT
Waiting to hear from DCC about DMPOnline APIs. HN has written an Orbital library for DMPOnline.
ICT Cloud Scoping Study includes Research Data Management requirement. Reports back May 2013.
Nucleus v2 (N2) is ready for production use. Will be a source of data for Researcher profile and store metrics, etc.
Open Stack not yet built. Will spend a day before Christmas looking at this. Joss is being interviewed by David Flanders (ANDS) for a podcast about academic uses of OpenStack.

Dissemination/Outreach/External

Joss is meeting with JISC and OKFN 14th December to discuss CKAN.
Carlos Silva (KAPTUR)  is visiting Lincon to discuss our use of CKAN in January
Paul has booked to attend the DCC conference in Amsterdam in January: Theme “What is a data scientist?”
Joss attended MRD Benefits and Impact event and discussed the Orbital project.

Budget

Joss is meeting with Jill Hubbard to get budget update.

Orbital Team Meeting 22nd November

Joss Winn / / Meetings

Present

Nick Jackson
Melanie Bullock
Joss Winn
Bev Jones
Paul Stainthorp
Harry Newton

Apologies

Annalisa Jones

Agenda

Policy & Business Case
Training
Technical
Dissemination
Budget

Policy & Business Case

Ieuan Owen has taken over senior management of research at the University.

JW met with Lisa Mooney and IO. Agreed policy and business case should be presented as “research services”, and include case studies where these have benefitted researchers.

JW to present business case to SMT on December 17.

Policy should be more presented more as collegial support than a university mandate. Policy to be re-worded to this effect.

Presentation to SMT – focus on long tail, benefits to institution, risk and benefits, “publishing of research data helped massively” in gaining new research grant. Roles required for RDM and institutional positions.

RDM proposed to be through existing roles, except for Data Scientist. LM suggested research funding for study into how role will fit into Lincoln.

Action: JW to circulate draft documents for business case and SMT presentation to Orbital team.

Development of policy and business case are on schedule.

Training

PS has developed an outline of a 1 hour training workshop covering RDM. Action: PS to blog this outline.

No success in getting PhD students from engineering to partake in initial sessions, will talk instead to Graduate School.

Training is not technical or software/process specific, instead focussing on high level concepts and best practice for RDM. Target is for training to be prepared by Christmas, even if sessions are not running by that time.

Existing RDM blog is to be used as authoring environment for policy and training documents and syndicated to permanent RDM site. Action: PS to talk to NJ and HN about ingestion of this content to Bridge.

When new Library Repository Officer is appointed, it was agreed they should become part of Orbital team, and involved in RDM.

Technical

Technical development continuing broadly to plan, with exception of OpenStack which has suffered various setbacks.

JW to include conceptual overview of Orbital Bridge in presentation to SMT.

Meeting planned with ICT to discuss Awards Management System (AMS) integration last week was cancelled due to illness, and has been rescheduled. AMS integration is highly desirable, but not essential.

NJ/PS/BJ/HN spent time on mapping concept of a ‘dataset’ within Orbital Bridge to ePrints using the SWORD deposit method.

Most of SWORD mapping is also valid for DataCite specification, which also informs sanity checking of data within Orbital Bridge.

Cost for membership of a DOI service to go into business case to SMT. DOIs should be minted at point of deposit to ePrints (‘publication’), and not at point of original dataset creation.

AMS project IDs are key for collecting items in a project together. AMS could also handle unfunded projects, but this will require extension of the system and is outside its current scope. Orbital avoids reliance on AMS by using Nucleus data store as primary keys and project IDs.

Dedicated time should be set aside for OpenStack work.

Dissemination

JW and PS went to JISC project meeting in Nottingham. JW presented on adoption of CKAN, as a result Bristol have adopted CKAN. JISC programme manager is encouraged by seeing us using CKAN.

JW went to DCC forum in Cambridge.

Management of active data is now a high priority in the RDM field.

JW submitted abstract for conference in Cologne on providing critical evaluation of CKAN for academic use. The resultant paper, if accepted, could inform JISC on the use of CKAN in academia.

A member of the Orbital team should attend DCC conference in Amsterdam, including specific themes on “what is a data scientist”. This will help inform a new role at Lincoln.

Budget

Funds remain for hardware and dissemination. It was suggested that some of this might be spent on developing a more permanent hosting solution for the Nucleus data warehousing platform.

Money is also required for a dedicated CKAN server and Orbital Bridge server, as well as possibly a dedicated database server for CKAN’s DataStore.

It is necessary to integrate Orbital with research impact analysis and recording systems. Action: MB to send NJ/HN information on impact recording systems.

A job description is being written for the post of “Research Information Management Developer” in the Library.

Hello CKAN

Joss Winn / / Announcements, Development, Meetings, News

On Wednesday, we hosted three people from the Open Knowledge Foundation, to discuss the Orbital project and their software, CKAN. It was a very engaging and productive day spent with Peter Murray-Rust (on the Advisory Board of OKFN), Mark Wainwright (community co-ordinator) and Ross Jones (core developer). We asked them at the start of the day to challenge us about our technical work on Orbital so far and I described the day to them as an opportunity to evaluate our work developing the Orbital software so far. We didn’t touch on the other aspects of the Orbital project such as policy development and training for researchers.

To cut to the chase, the Orbital project will be adopting CKAN as the primary platform for further development of the technical infrastrcuture for RDM at Lincoln. This is subject to approval by the Steering Group, but the reasons are compelling in many ways and I am confident that the Steering Group will accept this recommendation. More importantly, the Implementation Plan that was approved by the Steering group and submitted to JISC remains unchanged.

The raw notes from our meeting are available here. Remember these are raw notes written throughout the day, primarily for our own record. They probably mean more to us than they do to you! Thanks to Paul Stainthorp for his fanatical note taking 🙂

Here’s the list of attendees and our agenda:

Present

Peter Murray-Rust (OKFN)
Mark Wainwright (OKFN)
Ross Jones (OKFN)
Joss Winn (University of Lincoln, CERD)
Nick Jackson (University of Lincoln, CERD)
Harry Newton (University of Lincoln, CERD)
Jamie Mahoney (University of Lincoln, CERD)
Alex Bilbie (University of Lincoln, ICT services)
Paul Stainthorp (University of Lincoln, Library)

Agenda

09.30 Introductions
10.00 Orbital introduction and context: Student as Producer, LNCD; Orbital bid and pilot project; Discussion of Orbital approach, the data we’re using, user needs etc.
10.30 CKAN introduction and context
11.00 Technical discussion – Orbital
12.00 LUNCH
12.30 Technical discussion – CKAN
13.30 Discussion – should Orbital adopt CKAN?
14.00 data[.lincoln].ac.uk
15.00 Next steps; Opportunities for collaboration/funding?

What is probably of most interest to people reading this are the pros & cons of the Orbital project adopting CKAN. I’ll provide more context further into the post, but here’s a summary copied from our notes:

Continue reading “Hello CKAN”