ReDBox 2.0 - community feedback please

[Sharyn Wise]

Hi ReDBox Community 

 

UTS has engaged QCIF to help develop "the Provisioner", a project that (optionally) extends the functionality of ReDBox to encompass more of the research data management lifecycle and elicit more researcher engagement by linking the provisioning of data management 'workspaces' (certain types of data infrastructure e.g. filesystem, Omero, Gitlab, LabArchives etc) to data management plan creation. 

 

Part of this project involves some tweaks to ReDBox functionality so we are really keen to hear from the community on how they do things at their institutions, and thoughts on our plans - including objections and war stories!

 

Please note that I will be talking mainly about business rules / requirements and workflows rather than tech. However, still feel free to ask technical questions: someone will answer. Remember also that the authority on the general release of ReDBox 2.0 is still the team at QCIF who are working hard to make sure that ReDBox 2 is both more stable and works for existing clients.  

 

I’m attaching a document (RedboxWorkflows) with a high level As-Is/To-Be analysis which deals with our proposed ReDBox changes. To introduce you to the full lifecycle concept, including Provisioner, I am also attaching some data journey maps prepared by our B/A Frederique. Please note these are still a work in progress as it’s an agile project, and the first (Researcher journey) slide is more up to date than the other slides. (FYI: UTS ReDBox is called "Stash" and items in purple refer to other existing UTS systems; e.g. Open is our ‘new project’ form in Research Master).

 

Hope to hear from you!

 

kind regards

Sharyn

.Wise

@uts.edu.au

 

[Grant Jackson]

Hi Sharyn,

Thanks for sharing your info and inviting feedback. These UTS ideas look interesting.

I have a couple of thoughts. Your email text says "...linking the provisioning of data management 'workspaces' (certain types of data infrastructure e.g. filesystem, Omero, Gitlab, LabArchives etc) to data management plan creation". I realise workspaces implies work-in-progress data rather than final data, however I offer the following ideas.

1/ In addition to provisioning storage workspaces (or final storage spaces) at DMP creation time, perhaps they could be provisioned later. Eg. During an update to the DMP once the researcher knows what type of storage they want. Eg. At the data publication stage for those researchers who kept all their working spreadsheets on their PC and now need to share and preserve the data.

2/ I'm not certain what you have in mind regarding "linking" but at publication time when final data already exists, perhaps you could provision final/published storage by depositing into a storage-space via a generic protocol. Eg. For published data into a repository, perhaps you could use something like SWORD v1 or v2? This should work ok for the first-time deposit of a dataset and metadata into DSpace, Fedora, EPrints and some other repos. (However I wonder if updates to deposited data may not be supported in these repos even if SWORD v2 is used.)

QCIF: Having something like a SWORD integration to a repo might be a good "selling-point" (as mentioned today by Vicki). You might want to check if the community has any interest. You might be able to re-use source code from DSpace or other open-source implementation.

That's my 2 cents worth.

References:
- http://swordapp.org/about/
- http://swordapp.org/sword-v1/sword-v1-implementations/

Cheers, Grant

--
-- Website: http://www.redboxresearchdata.com.au
 
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[Andrew Brazzatti]

Hi Grant,

Some great suggestions there:

1. The model in the current implementation is to allow the plan to be updated at any stage which includes the provisioning of workspaces so your scenario should work fine. We have discussed the provisioner infrastructure also getting involved in other parts of the DLC such as archiving. Essentially the provisioner will write a metadata record about the workspace created and will have a form and REST APIs so that a user or another system can work with it. Because of this, we should be able to make the functionality available wherever it's needed.

2. We definitely should be supporting the popular standards to make interoperability easier. The ATOM protocol is a bit of an older standard. The proposed SWORD v3 uses a lot of technology that is common to the new ReDBox 2 platform so we'll monitor the progress on that as well.

Thanks,
Andrew