User's and Administrator's Manual of AMGA Metadata Catalog v 2.4.0 (EMI-3)

User's and Administrator's Manual of AMGA Metadata Catalog v 2.4.0 (EMI-3

Python for Archivists: Breaking Down Barriers Between Systems

[Excerpt] Working with a multitude of digital tools is now a core part of an archivist’s skillset. We work with collection management systems, digital asset management systems, public access systems, ticketing or request systems, local databases, general web applications, and systems built on smaller systems linked through application programming interfaces (APIs). Over the past years, more and more of these applications have evolved to meet a variety of archival processes. We no longer expect a single tool to solve all our needs and embraced the “separation of concerns” design principle that smaller, problem-specific and modular systems are more effective than large monolithic tools that try to do everything. All of this has made the lives of archivists easier and empowered us to make our collections more accessible to our users. Yet, this landscape can be difficult to manage. How do we get all of these systems that rely on different software and use data in different ways to talk to one another in ways that help, rather than hinder, our day to day tasks? How do we develop workflows that span these different tools while performing complex processes that are still compliant with archival theory and standards? How costly is it to maintain these relationships over time as our workflows evolve and grow? How do we make all these new methods simple and easy to learn for new professionals and keep archives from being even more esoteric

Report on the Second Catalog Interoperability Workshop

The events, resolutions, and recommendations of the Second Catalog Interoperability Workshop, held at JPL in January, 1988, are discussed. This workshop dealt with the issues of standardization and communication among directories, catalogs, and inventories in the earth and space science data management environment. The Directory Interchange Format, being constructed as a standard for the exchange of directory information among participating data systems, is discussed. Involvement in the Interoperability effort by NASA, NOAA, ISGS, and NSF is described, and plans for future interoperability considered. The NASA Master Directory prototype is presented and critiqued and options for additional capabilities debated

Iris: an Extensible Application for Building and Analyzing Spectral Energy Distributions

Iris is an extensible application that provides astronomers with a user-friendly interface capable of ingesting broad-band data from many different sources in order to build, explore, and model spectral energy distributions (SEDs). Iris takes advantage of the standards defined by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance, but hides the technicalities of such standards by implementing different layers of abstraction on top of them. Such intermediate layers provide hooks that users and developers can exploit in order to extend the capabilities provided by Iris. For instance, custom Python models can be combined in arbitrary ways with the Iris built-in models or with other custom functions. As such, Iris offers a platform for the development and integration of SED data, services, and applications, either from the user's system or from the web. In this paper we describe the built-in features provided by Iris for building and analyzing SEDs. We also explore in some detail the Iris framework and software development kit, showing how astronomers and software developers can plug their code into an integrated SED analysis environment.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy & Computin

Submission of content to a digital object repository using a configurable workflow system

The prototype of a workflow system for the submission of content to a digital object repository is here presented. It is based entirely on open-source standard components and features a service-oriented architecture. The front-end consists of Java Business Process Management (jBPM), Java Server Faces (JSF), and Java Server Pages (JSP). A Fedora Repository and a mySQL data base management system serve as a back-end. The communication between front-end and back-end uses a SOAP minimal binding stub. We describe the design principles and the construction of the prototype and discuss the possibilities and limitations of work ow creation by administrators. The code of the prototype is open-source and can be retrieved in the project escipub at http://sourceforge.ne