HaIRST: Harvesting Institutional Resources in Scotland Testbed. Final Project Report

The HaIRST project conducted research into the design, implementation and deployment of a pilot service for UK-wide access of autonomously created institutional resources in Scotland, the aim being to investigate and advise on some of the technical, cultural, and organisational requirements associated with the deposit, disclosure, and discovery of institutional resources in the JISC Information Environment. The project involved a consortium of Scottish higher and further education institutions, with significant assistance from the Scottish Library and Information Council. The project investigated the use of technologies based on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), including the implementation of OAI-compatible repositories for metadata which describe and link to institutional digital resources, the use of the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting (OAI-PMH) to automatically copy the metadata from multiple repositories to a central repository, and the creation of a service to search and identify resources described in the central repository. An important aim of the project was to identify issues of metadata interoperability arising from the requirements of individual institutional repositories and their impact on services based on the aggregation of metadata through harvesting. The project also sought to investigate issues in using these technologies for a wide range of resources including learning, teaching and administrative materials as well as the research and scholarly communication materials considered by many of the other projects in the JISC Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme, of which HaIRST was a part. The project tested and implemented a number of open source software packages supporting OAI, and was successful in creating a pilot service which provides effective information retrieval of a range of resources created by the project consortium institutions. The pilot service has been extended to cover research and scholarly communication materials produced by other Scottish universities, and administrative materials produced by a non-educational institution in Scotland. It is an effective testbed for further research and development in these areas. The project has worked extensively with a new OAI standard for 'static repositories' which offers a low-barrier, low-cost mechanism for participation in OAI-based consortia by smaller institutions with a low volume of resources. The project identified and successfully tested tools for transforming pre-existing metadata into a format compliant with OAI standards. The project identified and assessed OAI-related documentation in English from around the world, and has produced metadata for retrieving and accessing it. The project created a Web-based advisory service for institutions and consortia. The OAI Scotland Information Service (OAISIS) provides links to related standards, guidance and documentation, and discusses the findings of HaIRST relating to interoperability and the pilot harvesting service. The project found that open source packages relating to OAI can be installed and made to interoperate to create a viable method of sharing institutional resources within a consortium. HaIRST identified issues affecting the interoperability of shared metadata and suggested ways of resolving them to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of shared information retrieval environments based on OAI. The project demonstrated that application of OAI technologies to administrative materials is an effective way for institutions to meet obligations under Freedom of Information legislation

Towards Grid Interoperability

The Grid paradigm promises to provide global access to computing resources, data storage and experimental instruments. It also provides an elegant solution to many resource administration and provisioning problems while offering a platform for collaboration and resource sharing. Although substantial progress has been made towards these goals, nevertheless there is still a lot of work to be done until the Grid can deliver its promises. One of the central issues is the development of standards and Grid interoperability. Job execution is one of the key capabilities in all Grid environments. This is a well understood, mature area with standards and implementations. This paper describes some proof of concept experiments demonstrating the interoperability between various Grid environments

Research and Development Workstation Environment: the new class of Current Research Information Systems

Against the backdrop of the development of modern technologies in the field of scientific research the new class of Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) and related intelligent information technologies has arisen. It was called - Research and Development Workstation Environment (RDWE) - the comprehensive problem-oriented information systems for scientific research and development lifecycle support. The given paper describes design and development fundamentals of the RDWE class systems. The RDWE class system's generalized information model is represented in the article as a three-tuple composite web service that include: a set of atomic web services, each of them can be designed and developed as a microservice or a desktop application, that allows them to be used as an independent software separately; a set of functions, the functional filling-up of the Research and Development Workstation Environment; a subset of atomic web services that are required to implement function of composite web service. In accordance with the fundamental information model of the RDWE class the system for supporting research in the field of ontology engineering - the automated building of applied ontology in an arbitrary domain area, scientific and technical creativity - the automated preparation of application documents for patenting inventions in Ukraine was developed. It was called - Personal Research Information System. A distinctive feature of such systems is the possibility of their problematic orientation to various types of scientific activities by combining on a variety of functional services and adding new ones within the cloud integrated environment. The main results of our work are focused on enhancing the effectiveness of the scientist's research and development lifecycle in the arbitrary domain area.Comment: In English, 13 pages, 1 figure, 1 table, added references in Russian. Published. Prepared for special issue (UkrPROG 2018 conference) of the scientific journal "Problems of programming" (Founder: National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Institute of Software Systems of NAS Ukraine

Status Report of the DPHEP Study Group: Towards a Global Effort for Sustainable Data Preservation in High Energy Physics

Data from high-energy physics (HEP) experiments are collected with significant financial and human effort and are mostly unique. An inter-experimental study group on HEP data preservation and long-term analysis was convened as a panel of the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA). The group was formed by large collider-based experiments and investigated the technical and organisational aspects of HEP data preservation. An intermediate report was released in November 2009 addressing the general issues of data preservation in HEP. This paper includes and extends the intermediate report. It provides an analysis of the research case for data preservation and a detailed description of the various projects at experiment, laboratory and international levels. In addition, the paper provides a concrete proposal for an international organisation in charge of the data management and policies in high-energy physics

Designing requirements engineering research

Engineering sciences study different different topics than natural sciences, and utility is an essential factor in choosing engineering research problems. But despite these differences, research methods for the engineering sciences are no different than research methods for any other kind of science. At most there is a difference in emphasis. In the case of requirements engineering research - and more generally software engineering research - there is a confusion about the relative roles of research and about design and the methods appropriate for each of these activities. This paper analyzes these roles and provides a classification of research methods that can be used in any science—engineering or otherwise

Knowledge Nodes: the Building Blocks of a Distributed Approach to Knowledge Management

Abstract: In this paper we criticise the objectivistic approach that underlies most current systems for Knowledge Management. We show that such an approach is incompatible with the very nature of what is to be managed (i.e., knowledge), and we argue that this may partially explain why most knowledge management systems are deserted by users. We propose a different approach - called distributed knowledge management - in which subjective and social (in a word, contextual) aspects of knowledge are seriously taken into account. Finally, we present a general technological architecture in which these ideas are implemented by introducing the concept of knowledge node

Support for collaborative component-based software engineering

Collaborative system composition during design has been poorly supported by traditional CASE tools (which have usually concentrated on supporting individual projects) and almost exclusively focused on static composition. Little support for maintaining large distributed collections of heterogeneous software components across a number of projects has been developed. The CoDEEDS project addresses the collaborative determination, elaboration, and evolution of design spaces that describe both static and dynamic compositions of software components from sources such as component libraries, software service directories, and reuse repositories. The GENESIS project has focussed, in the development of OSCAR, on the creation and maintenance of large software artefact repositories. The most recent extensions are explicitly addressing the provision of cross-project global views of large software collections and historical views of individual artefacts within a collection. The long-term benefits of such support can only be realised if OSCAR and CoDEEDS are widely adopted and steps to facilitate this are described. This book continues to provide a forum, which a recent book, Software Evolution with UML and XML, started, where expert insights are presented on the subject. In that book, initial efforts were made to link together three current phenomena: software evolution, UML, and XML. In this book, focus will be on the practical side of linking them, that is, how UML and XML and their related methods/tools can assist software evolution in practice. Considering that nowadays software starts evolving before it is delivered, an apparent feature for software evolution is that it happens over all stages and over all aspects. Therefore, all possible techniques should be explored. This book explores techniques based on UML/XML and a combination of them with other techniques (i.e., over all techniques from theory to tools). Software evolution happens at all stages. Chapters in this book describe that software evolution issues present at stages of software architecturing, modeling/specifying, assessing, coding, validating, design recovering, program understanding, and reusing. Software evolution happens in all aspects. Chapters in this book illustrate that software evolution issues are involved in Web application, embedded system, software repository, component-based development, object model, development environment, software metrics, UML use case diagram, system model, Legacy system, safety critical system, user interface, software reuse, evolution management, and variability modeling. Software evolution needs to be facilitated with all possible techniques. Chapters in this book demonstrate techniques, such as formal methods, program transformation, empirical study, tool development, standardisation, visualisation, to control system changes to meet organisational and business objectives in a cost-effective way. On the journey of the grand challenge posed by software evolution, the journey that we have to make, the contributory authors of this book have already made further advances

DATUM in Action

This collaborative research data management planning project (hereafter the RDMP project) sought to help a collaborative group of researchers working on an EU FP7 staff exchange project (hereafter the EU project) to define and implement good research data management practice by developing an appropriate DMP and supporting systems and evaluating their initial implementation. The aim was to "improve practice on the ground" through more effective and appropriate systems, tools/solutions and guidance in managing research data. The EU project (MATSIQEL - (Models for Ageing and Technological Solutions For Improving and Enhancing the Quality of Life), funded under the Marie Curie International Research Staff Exchange Scheme, is accumulating expertise for the mathematical and computer modelling of ageing processes with the aim of developing models which can be implemented in technological solutions (e.g. monitors, telecare, recreational games) for improving and enhancing quality of life.1 Marie Curie projects do not fund research per se, so the EU project has no resources to fund commercial tools for research data management. Lead by Professor Maia Angelova, School of Computing, Engineering and Information Sciences (SCEIS) at Northumbria University, it comprises six work packages involving researchers at Northumbria and in Australia, Bulgaria, Germany, Mexico and South Africa. The RDMP project focused on one of its work packages (WP4 Technological Solutions and Implementation) with some reference to another work package lead by the same person at Northumbria University (WP5 Quality of Life). The RDMP project‟s innovation was less about the choice of platform/system, as it began with existing standard office technology, and more about how this can be effectively deployed in a collaborative scenario to provide a fit-for-purpose solution with useful and usable support and guidance. It built on the success of the Datum for Health project by taking it a stage further, moving from a solely health discipline to an interdisciplinary context of health, social care and mathematical/computer modelling, and from a Postgraduate Research Student context to an academic researcher context, with potential to reach beyond the University boundaries. In addition, since the EU project is re-using data from elsewhere as well as creating its own data; a wide range of RDM issues were addressed. The RDMP project assessed the transferability of the DATUM materials and the tailored DATUM DMP

A study of BIM collaboration requirements and available features in existing model collaboration systems

Established collaboration practices in the construction industry are document centric and are challenged by the introduction of Building Information Modelling (BIM). Document management collaboration systems (e.g. Extranets) have significantly improved the document collaboration in recent years; however their capabilities for model collaboration are limited and do not support the complex requirements of BIM collaboration. The construction industry is responding to this situation by adopting emerging model collaboration systems (MCS), such as model servers, with the ability to exploit and reuse information directly from the models to extend the current intra-disciplinary collaboration towards integrated multi-disciplinary collaboration on models. The functions of existing MCSs have evolved from the manufacturing industry and there is no concrete study on how these functions correspond to the requirements of the construction industry, especially with BIM requirements. This research has conducted focus group sessions with major industry disciplines to explore the user requirements for BIM collaboration. The research results have been used to categorise and express the features of existing MCS which are then analysed in selected MCS from a user’s perspective. The potential of MCS and the match or gap in user requirements and available model collaboration features is discussed. This study concludes that model collaborative solutions for construction industry users are available in different capacities; however a comprehensive custom built solution is yet to be realized. The research results are useful for construction industry professionals, software developers and researchers involved in exploring collaborative solutions for the construction industry