Tag: Siemens

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.

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

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

Report to the Research, Innovation and Enterprise Committee

Joss Winn / / Meetings

Part of the Orbital project governance is that I report to the university’s Research, Innovation and Enterprise Committee. The Committee meets every three months and I send a short report to each meeting and attend every other meeting. Here’s my report for the February committee meeting.

The Orbital Project

Progress report to the Research, Innovation and Enterprise Committee

30th January 2012

Author: Joss Winn, PI/PM.

Progress since the last update to the RIEC on 13th December:

  1. The short-term focus for the project continues to be the development of the technical infrastructure for managing research data, while being mindful of the long-term requirements to develop policy and a supportive environment for research staff.
  2. Software development has begun. We have finished setting up the development environment for the Orbital system. This is a major software development project for the university and we have spent some time designing the server architecture and quality assurance procedures for development.
  3. Orbital will make use of ‘cloud computing’ and is working with ICT as a pilot project for integrating cloud computing into our local infrastructure. A meeting took place with Eduserv, a non-profit provider of cloud computing to the HE sector (running on Janet) and a further meeting is taking place with Rackspace, a major commercial provider of cloud computing services. This work sits alongside ICT’s need to refresh their server infrastructure next year and will provide ICT with a real opportunity to investigate the business case for cloud computing as well as issues around actual implementation.
  4. A full-time post for a Web Developer has been advertised and we expect the post to begin late March/early April. This is the second full-time Web Developer post on the Orbital project.
  5. We are pleased that Dr. Ling from the School of Engineering and his PhD student, Chunmei Qing, will work with closely with the Orbital project in the development of the software, policy and training materials. Similarly, we are working with Prof. Chris Bingham and Stuart Watson (Siemens), and have recently joined their fortnightly research meetings, which are extremely useful to the Orbital project. At this stage, we welcome involvement from any Researcher in the School of Engineering and further into the project intend to broaden our use cases to other research disciplines.
  6. A meeting has been held with Dr. Mansur Darlington from the University of Bath. Dr. Darlington led the JISC-funded ERIM project, which studied the Research Data Management (RDM) issues for the discipline of Engineering.[1] The meeting was very useful for the Orbital team, including partners at Siemens and Researchers in the School of Engineering, who attended. The ERIM project provides a very robust, theoretical basis, which Orbital will attempt to build upon and implement. Similarly, a follow-up to the ERIM project will provide prototype tools, which we hope to build on for Orbital.[2] This is a key external relationship for the Orbital project.
  7. One issue flagged by Dr. Darlington concerned national funding bodies’ RDM policies. Each funding body has an RDM policy which requires universities to have effective methods in place for managing, preserving and disseminating research data.[3] The EPSRC has told all universities that we must provide them with a RDM roadmap by 1st May 2012 and must be compliant with these expectations by 1st May 2015.[4]
  8. The Orbital project is required by JISC to produce an RDM Policy for the institution. A national meeting is being organised by JISC to assist with the development of such policy in March. Following this, I suggest that a workshop is held in March where the Orbital project and other key staff from the Library and Research and Enterprise Office begin to draft this Policy and the required EPSRC roadmap. This can then be presented to the RIEC for discussion and approval prior to submission to the EPSRC.
  9. A meeting has been arranged for March 7th, 9.30-12pm, to discuss the Business Case for Open licenses. This discussion will be of interest for anyone concerned with licensing research outputs (‘Open Access’), software development projects (‘Open Source’), and teaching and learning resources (‘Open Educational Resources’). Staff from the JISC-funded OSS Watch, University of Oxford, will present at this meeting. Andrew Hunter and James Murray will attend and members of the RIEC are also welcome. Please RSVP to Joss Winn by end of February.
  10. Joss is working with JISC to organise a national event focussing on issues around software development for Research Data Management, which will be held in May.