Research in theology in the digital age: Opportunities and limitations

Digital text repositories in the field of theology and history, including the works of John Calvin (1509-1564), are promising tools assisting scholars with comprehensive search capabilities, collaborative projects, annotations, and editing options. This paper discusses a case study of the opportunities and limitations of online scholarly archives of primary sources concerning the works of Calvin with particular attention to research, education, and publication

Becoming the authoritative source: taking repositiories centre stage

Institutional repositories can be a storehouse of the research of an institution. There are many internal and external needs to find, use and report on the entirety or parts of an institution’s research output. This paper examines how to harness environmental factors to make an institutional repository the central and authoritative source of the research material output of a university. How to take it from “a place” to put research to making it “the place” and moving it from a nice-to-have service to one with a solid, sustainable future, one that the academic community values, supports and uses rather than sees as yet another administrative burden. A key value of research material is its authoritativeness. Researchers want to be able to say “this is my paper” or “this is the corpus of my research”. Research organisations want to be able to say the equivalent for all their researchers. The value of this identification is not just an assertion of authorship. It is also valued because the material can be authoritatively used to feed research discovery services and e-portfolios, fulfil reporting requirements to government and funders, substantiate promotions and back-up grant applications, and assist with benchmarking academic success in any given field. There are also many other uses for a repository.. The UNSWorks repository at the University of NSW will be used as a case study for this paper. The factors that can support the role of a repository as the authoritative source of research output are evaluated. The implications for interoperability with other institutional and external systems are identified, as are the resource implications and how success can be measured

Reuse and exchange of compound digital objects on the Web: the OAIORE project

The reuse and exchange of compound digital web resources offers new possibilities to create and describe collections of objects, regardless of their location, thereby facilitating new academic workflows. This paper is focused on the OAI-ORE project, the goals of which are based on the identification and description of aggregations of web resources and their interrelationships

From Artifacts to Aggregations: Modeling Scientific Life Cycles on the Semantic Web

In the process of scientific research, many information objects are generated, all of which may remain valuable indefinitely. However, artifacts such as instrument data and associated calibration information may have little value in isolation; their meaning is derived from their relationships to each other. Individual artifacts are best represented as components of a life cycle that is specific to a scientific research domain or project. Current cataloging practices do not describe objects at a sufficient level of granularity nor do they offer the globally persistent identifiers necessary to discover and manage scholarly products with World Wide Web standards. The Open Archives Initiative's Object Reuse and Exchange data model (OAI-ORE) meets these requirements. We demonstrate a conceptual implementation of OAI-ORE to represent the scientific life cycles of embedded networked sensor applications in seismology and environmental sciences. By establishing relationships between publications, data, and contextual research information, we illustrate how to obtain a richer and more realistic view of scientific practices. That view can facilitate new forms of scientific research and learning. Our analysis is framed by studies of scientific practices in a large, multi-disciplinary, multi-university science and engineering research center, the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS).Comment: 28 pages. To appear in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST

Economics and Engineering for Preserving Digital Content

Progress towards practical long-term preservation seems to be stalled. Preservationists cannot afford specially developed technology, but must exploit what is created for the marketplace. Economic and technical facts suggest that most preservation ork should be shifted from repository institutions to information producers and consumers. Prior publications describe solutions for all known conceptual challenges of preserving a single digital object, but do not deal with software development or scaling to large collections. Much of the document handling software needed is available. It has, however, not yet been selected, adapted, integrated, or deployed for digital preservation. The daily tools of both information producers and information consumers can be extended to embed preservation packaging without much burdening these users. We describe a practical strategy for detailed design and implementation. Document handling is intrinsically complicated because of human sensitivity to communication nuances. Our engineering section therefore starts by discussing how project managers can master the many pertinent details.

Citation and peer review of data: moving towards formal data publication

This paper discusses many of the issues associated with formally publishing data in academia, focusing primarily on the structures that need to be put in place for peer review and formal citation of datasets. Data publication is becoming increasingly important to the scientific community, as it will provide a mechanism for those who create data to receive academic credit for their work and will allow the conclusions arising from an analysis to be more readily verifiable, thus promoting transparency in the scientific process. Peer review of data will also provide a mechanism for ensuring the quality of datasets, and we provide suggestions on the types of activities one expects to see in the peer review of data. A simple taxonomy of data publication methodologies is presented and evaluated, and the paper concludes with a discussion of dataset granularity, transience and semantics, along with a recommended human-readable citation syntax

A MODEL-BASED REPOSITORY FOR OPEN SOURCE SERVICE AND COMPONENT INTEGRATION

Abstract: Open source is a software development paradigm that has seen a huge rise in recent years. It reduces IT costs and time to market, while increasing security and reliability. However, the difficulty in integrating developments from different communities and stakeholders prevents this model from reaching its full potential. This is mainly due to the challenge of determining and locating the correct dependencies for a given software artifact. To solve this problem we propose the development of an extensible software component repository based upon models. This repository should be capable of solving the dependencies between several components and work with already existing repositories to access the needed artifacts transparently. This repository will also be easily expandable, enabling the creation of modules that support new kinds of dependencies or other existing repository technologies. The proposed solution will work with OSGi components and use OSGi itself