Dear Simon,
I manage the PEKin project (http://www.kcl.ac.uk/iss/cerch/projects/portfolio/pekin.html), which is developing a preservation repository for research and administrative data produced in Kings College London. We're considering similar data management issues, although the emphasis is upon the creation of an archival system rather than a repository that integrates with the research process.
We're currently performing some work to integrate the Alfresco CMS (http://www.alfresco.com/) with Fedora Commons. Alfresco is widely used in the commercial sector, though I've only heard of one or two projects using it in the academic sector. It's relatively simple to use the software to establish a set of activities that should be performed to manage data in a workflow. We're currently using it to define the set of mandatory and conditional actions to be performed on objects in the Ingest workflow and may expand its role to perform other sets of activities if it works well. It may be worth a look if you need to define workflows to fit bespoke needs.
Regards,
Gareth
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Gareth Knight
Digital Curation Specialist
Centre for e-Research, King's College London
email: [log in to unmask]
phone: 0207 848 1979
________________________________________
From: Research Data Management discussion list [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Simon Collins [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 04 February 2010 17:52
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Technology for the RDM projects
Dear all
I'm working with the team at Manchester University on the current RDM program. We are about to finalise decisions on the technology that we will use for the project, which presently includes the fedora-commons repository, some Oracle tools and maybe some other bits and pieces. However, Simon Hodson sensibly suggested that we poll this list to see what other people are using before casting anything in stone.
Whilst a complete open source solution would be ideal, we are struggling to find one that meets broadly generic research data management needs (we plan to implement over different labs/faculties and don't want to implement niche solutions). We did evaluate the ARCHER eResearch toolkit which leant itself reasonably well to the problems in hand but we felt its fragmented and grid based implementation would be difficult to extend upon and support with the current IT infrastructure up here. For similar reasons (and time implications) we are also not keen to undertake a large software development program ourselves.
It would be interesting to hear what the other projects in this funding stream have chosen in terms of technology.
Thanks and Regards
Simon
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Dr Simon Collins
DBA
National Grid Service
University of Manchester
Research Computing Services
Devonshire House
Oxford Road
Manchester
Tel 0161 2750604
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