Tag: meetings

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.

Building on the ERIM and REDm-MED projects

Joss Winn / / Meetings

On January 20th, Dr. Mansur Darlington from the ERIM & REDm-Med projects came to Lincoln to discuss his work in relation to the Orbital project. Mansur has a consultancy role on the Orbital project and will be joining us again later on in the year, to help us evaluate our progress. It was a very useful and interesting meeting for all of the Orbital Team and the Engineering Researchers working with us. What became clear to us is that while ERIM offers the Orbital project a great deal of the underlying research and analysis of how Engineers work with data, Orbital can reciprocally feed back observations and issues arising from ERIM’s recommendations, which are theoretically robust but have not yet been tested in implementation. Similarly, with the REDmMEd project, which finishes in May/June, I hope that we can take the outputs of that prototyping work and build on them in the development of Orbital.

Here are Mansur’s slides from the meeting and below that, my notes.

ERIM, REDm-MED and Orbital
ERIM, REDm-MED and Orbital (II)
  1. Purpose of the meeting
  2. Introductions: Bev, Annalisa, Bingo, Chunmei, Joss, Stuart, Lee, Mark, Nick, Paul, Mansur. Apologies, Chris Leach.
  3. Engineers: Bingo, Chunmei, Stuart
  4. See slides. ERIM research offers good spread of Engineering research data.Industry collaboration is vitally important.
  5. MRD in general:

* Need to find out which RC (%), the funding into Engineering School comes from.
* All institutions have to put together a roadmap for RDM by May 2012 for EPSRC.
* Siemens/Lincoln spend a lot of effort in discovery of existing data to base investigations on.
* No national, dedicated Engineering data archive
* Need to look at API integration with DPMOnline (DCC)
* Orbital as tool for managing research projects?
* Ask DCC to visit Lincoln for Policy development and training.
* Reporting to DCC is a formal requirement.
* Include costs of MRD in the university overhead when bidding for funds.
* Datasets as an outcome of research projects. More ‘efficient’ to deal with RDM as part of project.
* ‘Market’ for data. Expectation of costs and benefits of MRD

6. The Nature of Engineering Research Data:

* ERIM: Engineering Research Information Management: Research activity data as well
* Problems with terminology. Need for definition. Both theoretical and practical/empirical outputs from the project.
* Good slides for terminology and understanding domain
* How does Orbital fit into the VRE puzzle?
* Transparent logging and capture of as much activity data as possible.
* Knowing the context is vital for understanding data. Orbital needs to concentrate on contextual data as much as ‘research data’.
* Orbital supports research lifecycle from bidding to completion?
* ‘Engineering research data’ covers pretty much all types of data.
* Need to identify other types of Engineering users to broaden scope of ‘Engineering data’
* Look outside Engineering for variety of data types/activity. Look beyond Engineering. Generalisable.
* Data types is one thing; methodologies and the data they produce are another.
* We manage data so that it can be RE-USED (by someone)
* Must not add to bureaucracy of research

Orbital is go! (Team meeting notes 24-11-2011)

Paul Stainthorp / / Meetings

Attending: Nick Jackson, Annalisa Jones, Bev Jones, Chris Leach, Paul Stainthorp, Joss Winn

Apologies: Lee Mitchell, David Young

Agenda

  1. Review Project Plan and Workpackages
  2. Status updates: Literature Review, User Requirements Analysis, Technology/Standards evaluation
  3. Forthcoming meetings and conferences (Agile method, Open Source policy, ERIM, Engineers, OR12, DCC, Start-up)
  4. Poster, papers, website
  5. Staffing and accommodation
  6. AOB

Notes

Joss Winn (JW) reported in detail:

  • JW reported on the work done to date (mostly relating to workpackage WP1), and reported back on:
    • The successful first meeting with users from the School of Engineering
    • The first Steering Group meeting on 3 November
    • The submission of the project plan
    • The appointment of NJ as lead developer
    • The relocation of NJ and PS (part-time) to CERD’s offices to work on Orbital
  • JW ran through the project outputs and workpackages in detail, identifying deadlines – most notably the Implementation Plan, which must be submitted by February 2012, with the following four pieces of work completed by then:
    • Data sources (NJ/CL)
    • User requirements (NJ)
    • Literature review (PS/BJ/CL)
    • Technical review (NJ/JW)
  • The group discussed the further user-engagement work to be completed in workpackages WP5, including Nick Jackson’s work with the School of Engineering to assess their requirements (through workshops, questionnaires, observation, and use of the Data Asset Framework – DAF), and on a planned round-table meeting about ERIM in late January
  • ACTION (NJ): dates needs to be set for user requirements exercises.
  • ACTION (PS): Date in late January needs to be set for ERIM workshop with Engineers.
  • PS reported on the work that he and NJ have begun to benchmark against the EPrints deposit workflow (WP8). NJ will work closely with BJ on this.
  • The group discussed WP9—the planned assessment of data sources—and CL’s role as library user. There are three obvious areas where Orbital crosses over with the Library’s priorities:
    • Integration with the Library’s Discovery selection & implementation project (CL)
    • Integration with the Repository (BJ)
    • Authentication (CL)
  • The Research & Enterprise office (i.e. AJ) will lead on WP11 – developing training materials & workshops.
  • JW will carry on the work with the University’s IP manager, James Murray on the correct approach to Open Sourcing code from Orbital – WP13.
  • ACTION: JW to follow up contacts with EPrints Services and OSSWatch.
  • Dissemination (WP14):
    • PS has been invited to speak at two events in January/February. The group will aim to have a publishable conference paper ready by Summer 2012. Submit abstract to OR12 by ?.
    • NJ, PS and JW are attending the project startup meeting in Nottingham on 1-2 December; presenting a poster. Also attending the DCC roadshow in Cardiff in mid-December.
  • Any other business:
    • JW is convening a meeting (8th December) about agile software and project development methods.
  • ACTION: as many people as possible from Orbital to attend ‘agile’ meeting.