Tag: RDM

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.

A Minimum Viable Product for Research Data Management?

Joss Winn / / Meetings

I’m at a meeting at the University of the West of England, focussing on RDM for post-92 universities. I briefly presented the Orbital project, focussing specifically on how we approached the first release of the Orbital software and how software development, and the learning that takes place in that process, is one way to learn about and understand the RDM domain. I am in no way advocating a technologically determined approach – far from it, as this is very much a user driven development project, as is evidenced in the use case I outline.

Orbital: Impact and benefits

Joss Winn / / Impact and Benefits

I’ve been asked to highlight the benefits of running the Orbital project so far. We’re seven months or so into Orbital, which is an 18 month project. In our initial Project Plan, we identified the anticipated impact of the project and so I’ll use that list in this blog post to reflect on the impact and benefits so far. The headings and text in italics are copied from the Project Plan.

Research practices

Researcher’s data management practices will change, supported by technologies that encourage new processes in the administration and dissemination of data.

We’ve had very little impact in this area so far. It’s too early to impact on researchers’ practices when we’re still developing our own knowledge and the infrastructure to support RDM. Changing researchers’ practices takes time. However, there are indications that it will happen. Engagement with our user groups and ad hoc requests for help from researchers who know we’re working on the project has shown us that researchers do want to change their practices. Our recent DAF survey also told us that researchers know that their practices could be improved and where they need support to do so.

Internal auditing

Greater oversight and analysis of research data created by researchers will be possible.

We’ve had no impact here and won’t until the Orbital software is built. We will be working on this in the next version of Orbital and our recent effort at the MRD Hack Day around activity data was a precursor to this work. We are increasingly seeing activity data as a key component of Orbital and this was underlined early on in the project when Mansur Darlington from the ERIM and REDm-MED projects stressed the importance of capturing contextual metadata.

Research governance

Improved methods of auditing research undertaken by the university will be possible, enabling greater cross-disciplinary work.

This relates to the benefit above around capturing activity data and improving ‘business intelligence’. As yet no real impact, but we still anticipate Orbital being a useful tool for reporting and enabling greater cross-disciplinary collaboration though greater transparency. Related to this is the creation of RDM Policy, which we have begun and has resulted in a statement being made for the EPSRC RDM ‘Road Map’.

Integrated services

Research data management will be integrated into existing systems, such as staff profiles, the institutional repository, blogs and calendars. Towards a Virtual Research Environment.

We have had a direct impact on the creation of new staff profiles at the university. Nick Jackson, Lead Developer on Orbital has been working with Alex Bilbie in the ICT Online Services Team to create an aggregated profile for staff. We blogged about it earlier and you can see my example. Profiles of staff are now aggregated from different systems and stored as RDF Linked Data and we intend to pull in activity data from Orbital to further enrich staff profiles. In this way, our work is being recognised and valued by other teams in the university. Furthermore, the university has recently procured a new ‘Awards Management System’, which will provide data to Orbital about funded research projects and we intend to couple Orbital with EPrints using SWORD2.

What is clear from our discussions with users is that they expect Orbital to do more than simply store and publish research data. Without using the term, they are effectively asking for a Virtual Research Environment (VRE). This is something which we did anticipate and have always planned for Orbital to be a tool for both analysing and publish research data. When discussing ‘Research Data Management’, there is a fine line between DMP planning, research project management, team workspaces and public web publishing and while we need to be careful that the scope of Orbital does not creep, we are sensitive to on-going user requirements.

FOI compliance

Will make FOI requests easier to respond to or unnecessary.

We’ve had no impact here so far, nor are we yet in a position to.

Open Data

Will promote and enable the production of public data sets.

As I will discuss in a forthcoming blog post about our first release of Orbital, we have had some impact here and have witnessed the benefits. In summary, a researcher contacted us for help with publishing some data, the result of which was an invitation to write a journal article about the data, offers of collaboration and the strengthening of an EU grant application.

Our workshop on open licensing has also led to a further meeting between myself (Joss Winn, Orbital PM), and the university’s IP Manager. A further follow up meeting is planned to draft guidance for staff on the use of open licenses for source code and data. Furthermore, research staff are being directed to the Orbital team for informal advice on open licensing. In this sense, we are beginning to improve the awareness and understanding of open licenses among researchers.

The innovation cycle

Will embed new technologies and culture change among professional staff at the university and lead to further innovation in our services.

We are having some impact here and have had meetings with central ICT staff about integrating our server farm with cloud services. We are currently developing the Orbital software using Rackspace, but have recently ordered hardware, partly paid for by the project, to establish a private cloud, running on OpenStack, for research and development at the university. In addition to this, our development toolchain has changed and we now have tools and processes in place that we did not have six months ago. These are being adopted outside of the Orbital project by staff within the ICT Online Services Team and other projects we are running. In addition to this, we intend that the changes we make to our own R&D tools and processes, are made available to other researchers and students. Over the summer, we will set up and maintain a university-wide Gitorious source code repository service (similar to Github), where staff and students who write code can form teams, manage their source code, and publish it if they wish. We also intend to run a Jenkins server for similar purposes so that all staff and students can benefit from source code control and the quality assurance processes that we have implemented through Orbital. Orbital is now a driver for a general R&D infrastructure for Academic Computing that project members and wider members of LNCD  are building.

I will write more about this at a later date because, for someone who manages R&D infrastructure projects at the university and wishes to engage staff and students in our work, I am excited to be able to integrate this into academic programmes and the work of other researchers.

I want to also stress that like all of our projects, the benefits, however slight, spill into other aspects of our work. Being a large project, Orbital has allowed us to concentrate on developing our toolchain and development environment across other projects, it’s given us time to learn new skills and share our learning with colleagues. In this way, it has been pivotal in the way we work and the future direction of our work.

Recruitment

Will build capacity for local development of innovative services

Orbital has allowed us to recruit two full-time Developers (Nick Jackson and Harry Newton). We are therefore two staff up and it is my intention to try and keep it that way.

Staff skills

Will improve staff skills and experience

Yes, we are benefitting in this way. The Orbital project team are now the RDM ‘experts’ in the university and despite being novices in this regard, over the course of the project staff working in the Library, ICT, Research and Enterprise Office and Centre for Educational Research and Development, are each developing their understanding of the processes and implications of RDM.

Clearly an 18 month project (at least the way I run them!), allows for staff to learn new tools and skills, experiment with new methods of working and disseminate this learning to other staff. This is one constant that I value highly about our project work. Despite the stop and start nature of project work and that not all of our work eventually makes it into a fully fledged university services, the tools and learning, especially as we engage more with academic programmes, goes beyond the confines of the project and is most satisfying.

I have written more about my interest in how hackers learn and the university as a hackerspace.

Culture change

Will change the research culture of the university by improving the tools available for managing and sharing data.

From the point-of-view of RDM, this is closely related to the first anticipated impact/benefit. We cannot claim to have any real evidence of benefits or impact at this stage on how we manage research data. However, as I’ve noted several times above, our use of the cloud, our advocacy of open licensing, our implementation of new R&D tools and processes, are also part of ‘culture change’ at the university. Furthermore, due to the DAF survey, the Orbital project is now widely known by researchers beyond our initial user group in the School of Engineering, and through our reporting to the university Research, Innovation and Enterprise Committee, staff at all levels are made aware of our work. Gradually, the idea of ‘research data management’ is being understood.

Technology choices

Will influence future choices in technologies (both locally developed and outsourced).

Yes! See above.

HE sector R&D

Contributes to innovative R&D in the HE sector

Yes, I think we are beginning to do this and the benefits so far are around shared learning among developers across different projects. We were instrumental in early discussions about the DevCSI MRD Hack Day and three of us contributed to the two day event. We blog regularly on this site (around 50 posts so far) and share our work with anyone who is interested (see the links in the sidebar).

Public Sector data management

As yet, the Orbital project can only claim to have resulted in one research dataset being published (again, more on this soon as I want to explain it in more detail). However, Orbital has grown out of our work over the last couple of years around managing and re-using institutional data, resulting in data.lincoln.ac.uk. We are also active members of the data.ac.uk initiative and I chaired the data.ac.uk panel at Dev8D this year.

Efficient re/use of resources

Demonstrably re-uses and builds on previous work, both funded and non-funded projects.

Yes, this was an early benefit of the project. We are building on our previous work and what we have learned from it in past projects. Our use of MongoDB, our work on staff profiles, our use of OAuth, and our API-driven approach to development, all build on past projects, funded and un-funded.

Implementation Plan

Joss Winn / / Announcements, Development, Policy, Project Management, Research

Introduction

The Orbital Implementation Plan (WP6) is intended to be a synthesis of our initial user requirements gathering (WP5), an assessment of Engineering research data (WP9), an evaluation of standards and technologies (WP10), informed by a literature review of previous work relevant to the Research Data Management (RDM) domain as it relates the discipline of Engineering (WP4).

Therefore, appended to this Implementation Plan is: i) a Technical Specification based on user requirements; ii) a Literature Review; iii) a summary of an institution-wide survey based on the Data Asset Framework; iv) and a draft Research Data Management Policy for the University of Lincoln (WP7), which is currently under-going internal review.

The Implementation Plan has been written at exactly a third of the way into the Orbital project (six months), allowing for a further year of development based on the work brought together in this document. It is worth repeating the objectives of the project, as stated in the Project Plan:

We intend to build on our previous work around the deposit, management and access to university research as well as further existing work in which we are building a platform for data-driven services at the university.

Throughout this undertaking, we aim to improve our understanding of the issues around research data management; develop the requisite skills among the university community to better manage research data; re-use and develop some of the underlying tools we have built to provide an institution-wide service for the ingest, description, preservation and dissemination of research data; improve the way we work on such projects, refining our use of agile methods; build capacity for the local development of academic technologies at the university; develop and implement appropriate institutional policy for the deposit, management and sharing of research data; and develop a Business Plan for the university for the long-term sustainability of our research data.

Our work to-date has pursued many of these objectives closely, reflecting continued effort over the last six months, both inside and outside the project, to build on previous work by using institutional data to drive application development; to improve our methods of access and identity management; and develop an environment that fosters and supports in-house innovation.

This planning document is primarily intended to support the technical implementation of the Orbital application to manage research data at the University of Lincoln. What it does not address is the training to support the use of the application (WP11), nor the Business Case for sustaining the pilot service (WP13), which we are implementing. However, some preliminary work is underway to consider appropriate business models for sustaining Orbital as open source software and we believe that the technical decisions laid out in this Implementation Plan will support the development of a sustainable Business Case for Orbital. This area of work continues and the outcomes are due to be delivered towards the end of the project.

What follows is a brief summary of the appended Technical Specification and Literature Review. I would like to thank Nick Jackson and Paul Stainthorp for their work on these documents, which have brought clarity to the Orbital project and contributed to a much better understanding of RDM at the University of Lincoln.

Joss Winn, Orbital Project Manager, 2nd April 2012.

Literature Review

The management of research data is recognised as one of the most pressing challenges facing the higher education and research sectors. Research data generated by publicly-funded research is seen as a public good and should be available for verification and re-use. In recognition of this principle, all UK Research Councils require their grant holders to manage and retain their research data for re-use, unless there are specific and valid reasons not to do so. (JISC Managing Research Data Programme 2011-13).

To gain a clearer understanding of the more complex and unfamiliar concepts in the emerging discipline of Research Data Management, the Orbital project conducted a review of published literature on the subject (mainly web sites, project reports and guidance documents), with particular reference to RDM in the discipline of engineering.

An online Research Data Management bibliography is being maintained at: http://lncn.eu/bcf6

The project team identified the following nine themes in the literature – for each theme, a recommendation is made which will support the development of RDM infrastructure at the University of Lincoln.

1. Fundamentals of research data and RDM

Researchers are not a homogeneous group, and their data needs are changing as the research landscape becomes more complex. Recommendation: the Orbital project continue its work to assess the storage and other requirements of Lincoln researchers using surveys and interviews.

2. Particular requirements of the discipline of engineering

The ERIM (Engineering Research Information Management) project at the University of Bath has specified the first ever set of RDM principles and terminology designed specifically for engineers. Recommendation: the Orbital continue to work with the Bath team on implementing ERIM’s findings.

3. The behaviour of researchers

What motivates researchers to invest in RDM is not the same as what motivates their institutions. Recommendation: Orbital to use surveys and interviews to understand researchers’ requirements and develop appropriate advocacy materials.

4. RDM policies and legal aspects

All UK Research Councils are introducing mandates for data curation, and in some cases data publication. Recommendation: the Orbital team to support the University’s response to the imminently required EPSRC data policy roadmap and to help develop institutional policies.

5. Data sharing

Research data are at their most useful when they are interoperable with other data. Sharing data leads to a range of real and measurable benefits, and researchers’ interests are protected by a principle of ‘proprietary period’ of privileged access. Recommendation: Orbital work with Research & Enterprise to formulate clear policies on data sharing and licensing.

6. Costs and benefits

The most significant RDM costs for the institution occur at the data acquisition/ingest stage. Institutions that invest in RDM can expect significant benefits including new, unforeseen research activities made possible through the re-use and aggregation of data. Recommendation: Orbital provide guidance to researchers on ensuring RDM is costed into future research funding bids.

7. Curation standards, metadata and citation

Without a system for assigning citations to research data, further curation and sharing is impossible. Recommendation: Orbital incorporate the functionality of DataCite to allow Lincoln researchers to secure a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) for their data objects.

8. Technical considerations

The range of file formats involved in engineering research is a significant area of complexity. Recommendation: Orbital continue to work with Siemens, the School of Engineering, the University of Bath and the DCC to develop expertise in handling engineering data formats.

9. Tools, support and training

A range of immediately re-purposable RDM training kits and planning tools already exists. Recommendation: Orbital review the available material, and use them to design a RDM training programme for the University of Lincoln – also incorporate Data Management Planning (DMP) tools within the Orbital application.

In light of this, the initial objectives of the Orbital project were on the mark, but indicate a broad area of institutional responsibility that goes beyond scholarly communication to affect strategic areas such as recruitment and training, business intelligence and continuity, IP and income generation, as well as future curriculum design and our corresponding investment in infrastructure and estate. No small task.

Technical Approach

Our Project Plan outlined the technical approach that we originally anticipated and six months later this has not fundamentally changed. As detailed in the Technical Specification, we remain convinced of the benefits of pursuing a data-driven, API-centric model of development, using storage and access control methods that support the creation of a modular and scaleable web application that is attractive to both Users and Developers.

As we have learned from our requirements gathering and literature review, Research practices both within and across subject disciplines are varied, suggesting that over the next 12 months, the Orbital project should concentrate on developing an application that remains open and attractive to further development, rather than seeking to design a single workflow for all users’ needs – an impossible task.

We believe this approach best supports the sustained development of Orbital beyond the life of the pilot project, allowing both Researchers and software Developers to create applications for Orbital to suit the requirements of specific research disciplines at a given point in time. Likewise, an API-centric approach will also ensure that our existing and related applications, such as institutional repository software and research information systems can equally be treated as ‘users’ (producers and consumers) of Orbital.

As we outlined in our Project Plan, this approach allows us to benefit from work which continues outside the Orbital project such as that around Access and Identity Management and academic profiles, and the development of data.lincoln.ac.uk. It is also a suitable approach for the development of Orbital as open source software, which should remain simple to develop for specific user’s needs if it is to receive interest and contributions from developers outside the university.

The Technical Specification contains five core functional requirements: Projects, Workspace, Archives, Working Dataset, and Publication. A Project may result in a specific Publication(s), while the Workspace, Archives and Working Dataset allow for three non-sequential methods of data storage, manipulation and analysis. These requirements are loosely coupled to one another, but do not represent a publication workflow. Orbital is not simply intended to be a data repository, but the basis of a flexible collaborative environment for working Researchers.

Each Project acts as a conceptual container for all data and represents the ‘space’ in which administrative, descriptive and contextual metadata is captured and stored, as well as the datasets themselves. It is at the level of a Project that Orbital will interface with other systems, such as an institutional repository or research information system by storing, exchanging and publishing information according to recognised standards, such as CERIF, SWORD2, DOI, etc.

Finally, a core requirement from Orbital is that data should be stored, accessed and transported securely. Being a native web application, we have opted to implement the OAuth 2 protocol to provide secured access to all API functions over HTTPS. As such, all user applications will be treated equally and will be required to access the core Orbital APIs via this popular and mature standard for application authentication on the web. OAuth is increasingly being deployed at the University of Lincoln and work continues outside of the Orbital project to implement it as part of an institution-wide Single Sign On (SSO) architecture.

Related project blog posts

Chosen Methodology

Jenkins, build my software

Pivoting Around

Project Planning: Quality Assurance

Understanding and participating in open source culture

The Toolchain: First Pass

Tracking progress

Literature Review

An Orbital project reading list

Initial User Requirements

Meeting our users, the Engineers

Assessment of Data Sources

Research Data vs Research Data

Let’s Look At Data

Data, Data Everywhere

Gluing people together

Evaluation of standards and technologies

How the National Archives use MongoDB

Forecast: Cloudy

Piloting the cloud

Why Orbital is all about the API

Servers, Servers Everywhere

Eating your own dog food: Building a repository with API-driven development

Hello? Is it me you’re looking for?

Orbital and the OAIS reference model

News from Orbital: Policy, Implementation Plan and a first release date

Joss Winn / / Development, News, Policy

It feels like there’s been quite a lot coming together recently. Here’s what we’re working on:

  • A draft RDM policy (WP7)
  • Our Implementation Plan (WP6), which includes our Literature Review (WP4), initial user requirements analysis (WP5), our technical evaluation (WP10), and assessment of data sources (WP9). All of this goes to the Steering Group tomorrow and all being well, will be posted on this project blog a day or two later.
  • A DAF-based survey (23 questions) of researchers’ data management practices and requirements. We’ve asked all Engineering academics to complete this via the Head of School; we’ve sent a request to all Research Directors in the university to encourage their academic colleagues to complete the survey, and have also advertised it to all staff on three occasions this week via the daily all staff alerts. So far, 28 people have completed it (about 5% of staff on academic contacts). We’ll continue to push this after the Easter break and publish a summary once we think we’ve exhausted our chances of staff filling it in on mass. Probably later in the month.
  • Harry Newton joined us as a second Developer, working with Nick Jackson. Harry graduated with an MSc in Computer Science from Lincoln last year. He’s been ‘bedding in’ this week and started working on adding ‘projects’ functionality to Orbital.
  • A release date for v0.1 of the Orbital software is May 1st. A couple of weeks ago, a Robotics researcher asked us if we could help him publish his datasets (20GB). We did so, offering him server space, guidance on his choice of license and a proxy URL to use for citation. It made us realise that there’s probably quite a few researchers like him that just need to get data on the web for citation purposes, so we thought we’d aim to have something permanently in place for the university by May 1st. Functionality for the v0.1 release will be: secure login, basic project creation and deletion, file upload, license picker, publish to permanent URL for citation. We think this is the bare minimum needed for a researcher to publish open research data so that it is permanently citable. From May 1st, we’ll maintain a working system on which to base discussions with users about additional functionality. For the time-being, researchers wishing to upload data will have to discuss it with us first.
  • We’re on the list of testers for the new DataCite API and have registered with ORCID, too, which has a mock API for testing against.
  • We’re helping organise the JISC MRD/DevCSI MRD Hackday on May 2-3rd, when we hope to be able to demo this work and talk about the implementation in detail. Fingers crossed.