Activities in the e-research domain
The Link Affiliates team within ADFI at the University of Southern Queensland is continuing to work on interoperability and standards in the e-research domain. Based on consultation with the sector and key stakeholders, the following activities are being undertaken.
Service Modelling
Work continues with the e-Framework as a means for promoting common, service-based understanding of system functionality including:
- planning infrastructure support for systems
- formulating descriptions of core infrastructure services (particularly in collections management), which can serve as common benchmarks in system description
- describing existing and projected e-research systems such as TARDIS using the e-Framework, to clearly establish their infrastructure requirements
- refining the formal model of the e-Framework, to guarantee a common understanding and vocabulary for its use in analysis and evaluation of systems
Contributing to Project Bamboo
Project Bamboo, being funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, is a wide-ranging initiative to improve humanities research through the development of common services hosted on a shared services infrastructure. A recent joint effort has resulted in the University of Melbourne's e-Scholarship Research Centre (eSRC) and the Link Affiliates team documenting and contributing material relating to the Australian Women's Archive Project to Project Bamboo.
Collections Modelling
The collections standards ISO2146 and Encoded Archival Context (EAC) are being modelled and compared for identifying and describing the ontology of collections and repositories. This work is being undertaken:
- to allow interoperability between different systems based on those standards; notably NLA People Australia and ANDS Register My Data
- to be formulated capitalising on previous Link Affiliates experience in the repository domain
- reinforced by the similar work Link Affiliates is undertaking for the DER in the e-learning context
- paying particular attention to the modelling of e-research parties, who are involved in creating and managing data. Modelling parties has become a critical enabler in organising and discovering data, but has not yet reached the same level of consistency as data and registry services
The comparison has been published, and has been sent to ANDS as feedback in their review of their RIF-CS schema for encoding collection information. A series of blog posts on identity modelling were also written, to motivate the comparison and the considerations underlying it.
Persistent Identifiers
Link Affiliates is continuing to do work on persistent identifiers, following on the successes of the PILIN project.
- Link Affiliates was contracted to contribute its expertise to the Identify My Data persistent identifier service of the Australian National Data Service. Link Affiliates contributed requirements analysis with various research bodies interested in using the service; it also contributed substantially to the documentation of the service, available online.
- Link Affiliates took part in the UKOLN/DRIVER workshop on repository interoperability, held in Amsterdam in March 2009. Link Affiliates participated in the identifier interoperability stream, helping work towards a more decentralised notion of identifier interoperability, compatible with the Semantic Web. (See blog post.)
- A paper on persistent identifier policy requirements, building on the work of the PILIN ANDS Transition Project, was published in D-Lib in January 2009; a translation into Czech is forthcoming in Knihovna (Journal of the National Library of the Czech Republic).
- A paper outlining the PILIN identifier ontology has been accepted for publication in Ariadne
