Tag: minutes

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.

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.