[ckan4rdm] Short introduction of project EDaWaX

Tue Apr 23 09:39:11 UTC 2013

Hi Joss,

thanks a lot for your detailed answer and the raised questions.
For now only some clarifying remarks, and I hope we can continue the
discussion.

--On 2013-04-22 13:38, Joss Winn wrote:

> So when you say that CKAN is not focused on 'research data', are you
> suggesting that CKAN has yet to address the curatorial needs of managing
> open data over the long-term?

Partly, yes. But there are other issues. One of the most
important for us is that CKAN lacks proper metadata schemes. In
our scenario CKAN will mainly be the discovery (or cataloguing)
tool. But to do so sufficiently we need more fields for metadata.
In addition, these fields should be based on a standardised
schema, like Datacite, da|ra or even DDI. That's what we will try
to do with our extension which I've described in step 3. CKAN.

> I should say that in my evaluation of CKAN, this seems to be something I
> keep coming back to. The driving motivations for the development of CKAN
> are not coming from the archives/librarian professions, which is where
> 'research data management' seems to now sit.

You are absolutely right, but the good news is, that CKAN
technically has all the requirements to handle the needs of
libraries and research data management. Its programming is
rock-solid yet not to complex, it has a nice plugin mechanism, and
there is the great API that enables many other unforeseen usage
scenarios. 

> Does your roadmap contradict what I suggest above? :-) Point 3 refers to a
> standards-based development of the CKAN metadata schema; point 4 refers to
> discovery and ingest of datasets; point 5 refers to integration (and
> workflow?).

No, no contradiction here :-)

> Will the integration work create additional workflows for data curation
> via OJS and Plone?

Depends on what you have in mind when speaking of 'curation'. The
basic idea is to enable editors to a) upload the data to CKAN,
and b) to manage the most basic metadata, both from within the
journal's CMS.  

> If so, this is similar to what we've done at Lincoln, where we use the
> CKAN APIs to incorporate CKAN into a curatorial deposit workflow that
> retrieves a datacite DOI and deposits metadata into Eprints, which is the
> canonical record of institutional research outputs and data.

That sounds very similar, yes. Can you provide any further
details on this? What exactly is the role of CKAN in this
scenario, when Eprints collects the metadata and also, as I
assume, the research data?

best regards
hendrik

-- 
Dr. Hendrik Bunke
ZBW - Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften
--Innovative Informations- und Publikationstechnologien--
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