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
- JW, NJ and HN reported on the recent MRD hack days.
- JW recently attended an event organised by the UWE in Bristol (Raising your ReDMan:Approaches to Research Data Management), at which he spoke about Orbital’s minimum viable product approach, and about how Lincoln’s user-led development means we have to take a close interest in RDM issues.
- NJ and JW are presenting a paper at OR12 (Open Repositories 2012). PS will attend for ~1 day of the conference.
- JW is chairing a planning event with Ken Evans, emeritus professor at UoL – looking at data/schema modelling for all the University’s research information systems (Orbital, EPrints, the Awards Management System, people systems) using an Object Role Modelling (ORM) approach.
- Data Asset Framework survey
- 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.
