Tag: LNCD

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”

Orbital Team meeting notes 26-07-12

Joss Winn / / Meetings

Agenda & notes

  1. Application update: Orbital v0.3 will be release today. New dynamic dataset features. Import/export/query data. Already auto importing Siemens’ sensor data for analysis. Integration with MatLab will be presented to the Siemens/Lincoln research group on August 1st. We have set up ownCloud as an alternative to Dropbox and integrated with it with Lincoln SSO. Working on full integration with Orbital for Orbital v0.4 release next month. Nick, Harry and other members of LNCD will take third/fourth weeks in August to set up and build OpenStack private cloud for R&D/Academic Computing. Following that, Orbital servers on Rackspace will be moved in-house to OpenStack. Initially starting with three servers (26 cores, 140GB RAM) and 30TB storage. We intend to provide a Continuous Integration (CI) environment (Gitorious/Jenkins) for staff and student research, as well as  support LNCD R&D.
  2. Edinburgh/OR12:  Presented a paper at OR12, which was well received. Came away thinking that RDM has ‘arrived’ and that platforms for RDM need to be more integrated into research process than research output repositories have been. Orbital is well placed for this e.g. ‘dynamic datasets’. Discussed systems with OKFN/CKAN representative at OR12 and have invited OKFN to Lincoln to discuss CKAN and Orbital. Initial Skype meeting Monday 30th July. We have asked OKFN to challenge/persuade us as to why we should adopt CKAN rather than continue to develop Orbital. Need to think about the pros/cons of eight more months of Orbital development vs. eight months contributing to CKAN development. May lead to Lincoln extending CKAN for academic RDM, re-using bits of Orbital. Still not clear. Nick has also contacted Patrick at Soton about his winning proposal for DevCSI developer challenge. Patrick’s proposal is very similar to Orbital and both Nick and Patrick are keen to work on dynamic data and visualisations together with others.
  3. RDM Policy: Joss and Annalisa met with Andrew S, Head of Research & Enterprise Office. Reviewed draft RDM Policy. Will make minor amendments but on the whole agreement on way forward.
  4. Training: Joss, Annalisa, Melanie, Bev, Paul to meet early September and bring together RDM training materials produced by other projects. Evaluate, synthesise, extend and re-package for Lincoln. Agreed to arrange RDM training workshops via HR for staff every three weeks from late September to test and inform the development of this project deliverable. Annalisa/Melanie to arrange meeting and workshops.
  5. Metadata: Discussion about adopting BL’s minimum metadata requirements for DataCite. Agreement that the mandatory and optional attributes should be part of Orbital. Need to talk to/confirm with Bev about this and add relevant tasks to Pivotal Tracker. CKAN (see above) meeting relevant to this. If CKAN is used to publish datasets, need to ensure it meets this requirement.
  6. Research Information/Systems integration: Research Information Management (RIM) at the university is dependent on three systems: new Awards Management System (AMS) (Research and Enterprise Office), Orbital, and EPrints (Library). Need to contact Worktribe about API access to AMS for Orbital. EPrints work planned to add the ‘REF plugin’ will give us better data. SWORD2 deposit from Orbital planned. Again, need to consider in light of CKAN conversations. Other work going on in university to build business intelligence dashboards. Lee to arrange meeting with Registry DBAs and Orbital team to discuss data warehousing and dashboards. Lots of overlap in interest/experience/skills. Not enough talking.
  7. Business Case: Joss still waiting on storage modelling costs from ICT to present to SMT in September. Will start process of writing Business Case following that meeting.

 

Orbital notes, 24 May 2012

Paul Stainthorp / / Meetings

The Orbital project team met today (24 May 2012) and agreed the following:

  • Documentation
  • User documentation will focus on the “why”s of Research Data Management, rather than being a point-and-click guide to the Orbital UI (which should not require detailed explanations).
  • JW will create a changelog (human readable text file) for each major release of Orbital, so that documentation for each feature is review if that feature is updated.
  • PS will lead on writing documentation (as HTML pages, stored in the GitHub repository), with documentation for release v0.N completed and available by the launch of v0.N+1
  • PS will email colleagues from the Library and Research/Enterprise for assistance on writing documentation.
  • Training
  • JW will invite Melanie Bullock and David Sheppard on to the Orbital working group. He is meeting Annalisa Jones to discuss RDM training for staff.
  • Releases/development
  • Orbital v0.1.1 (including bug fixes) met all of the initial ‘minimum viable product‘ requirements specified by Dr Tom Duckett, and also includes the basics of project administration.
  • v0.2 will include improvements to the file upload/management, project management, and license management interfaces, as well as clearer distinction between language files and operating code.
  • NJ demoed the current version of Orbital to Siemens staff. He now has access to Siemens machine data for testing within Orbital.
  • The group discussed the LNCD plans for internal servers/private cloud, and about the disk space requirements and costs.
  • Integration
  • The current version of the DMPOnline tool has been installed on a test server. The group discussed our approach to integration between external tools/software (such as DMPOnline, R, Gephi) and Orbital.
  • NJ is going to email Adrian Richardson at the DCC to ask when the DMPOnline APIs will become available.
  • RDM policy
  • JW presented the draft policy to the University RIEC committee. The committee have been asked to send comments to Joss. (One comment at the committee meeting was that our having a policy too geared around the requirements of the Research Councils may not be appropriate for Lincoln, which generates a lot of non-RC income. However it was noted that the good practice specified by the RCs is good practice for management of all research data, whatever the funding source.)
  • Conferences and meetings
  • The group discussed the recent DAF survey which we conducted at the University of Lincoln.
  • JW will convene a sub-group to consider the responses in detail, and plan follow-up interviews.
  • Business case
  • JW is currently gathering costs for long-term data storage. This will form the first strand of the Orbital business case, which will be presented to University SMT (along with the agreed RDM policy) in September 2012.