The first release of Orbital (v0.1) was on May 16th 2012. Orbital is a research and development project that has initial funding until March 2013. Given that timeframe, what follows is a high-level roadmap of where we expect development to go over the next few months.
We plan to release a new, working version of Orbital around the beginning of each month, up to December 2012, when we hope to hit v1.0. We plan to have a further point release in February, based on user feedback and then give ourselves a month to tidy things up and wind down this phase of the project.
You can read our implementation plan, check out our responses to user feedback and watch our project tracker for more details. The code can be downloaded here and here. Be aware that the roadmap may change at any time, based on user requirements, illness and natural disaster.
v0.1 (May)
See announcement. Authentication, user profiles, projects, upload of flat file data, a license picker, private and public archives, publish to the web, stable identifiers, download of flat files, analytics, and a way to give feedback.
v0.2 (June)
Documentation (for both developers and users), activity data, working/dynamic datasets + APIs, app access (OAuth), bug fixes, responses to feedback.
v0.3 (July)
User workspaces, version control, data staging (workflow), data snapshots, tools for basic analysis of datasets.
v0.4 (August)
EPrints integration (SWORD2), integration with Lincoln’s Award Management System (Worktribe), APIs for discovery, full role/permissions management, documentation.
v0.5 (September)
Plugins for third-party tools (e.g. Matlab)
v0.6/0.7/1.0 (Oct/Nov/Dec)
Network drive for desktop workspaces, full documentation for RDM, DataCite, ORCID, DMPOnline integration, improve design/branding, federated access.
Happy Christmas!