dr-rg

Digital Repositories Research Group

Data

The goal of the Digital Repositories Research Group (DR-RG) is to analyze how digital repositories can be built on top of federated storage infrastructure, focusing on the exploitation of existing data-related standards and the identification of need for new or revised data-related standards.

The group is building on the results of three workshops organized by OGF-Europe, DReSNET and OMII-UK (at OGF23, the 4th International Digital Curation Conference, and OGF25) where interactions between the Digital Repositories and the OGF communities started. At these workshops the need for a focused analysis was established and there was general agreement to form an OGF group.

The RG may study any aspects of building digital repositories on top of federated storage infrastructures but the initial focus will be on two specific areas:

* Metadata Use-Case collection
Metadata handling is key to digital repositories and metadata interchange is the key to federated repositories. The RG will collect and analyze different use-cases in the various communities to identify common architectures and build a basis for potential future standardization efforts in metadata handling. Note that this differs from metadata definitions, which are domain-specific and beyond the scope of this group.

* Architecture Study
The architectures of typical digital repositories will be analyzed to identify communalities. Emphasis will be given to federated repositories. This will serve as basis for identifying the potential for exploitation of existing standards as well as the need for new or revised standards.

Where appropriate, the RG will use the ISO Open Archival Information System (OAIS) reference model for specifying archive systems as a basis for architecture analysis.

Title: DR Architecture Study
Title: DR Metadata Use-Cases

1. Is the scope of the proposed group sufficiently focused?
Digital repositories is a wide field, however, the group will initially focus on two well defined topics.

2. Are the topics that the group plans to address clear and relevant for the Grid research, development, industrial, implementation, and/or application user community?
Yes, this has been established at a series of workshops involving the DR and OGF communities.

3. Will the formation of the group foster (consensus-based) work that would not be done otherwise?
Yes, bringing the DR and storage communities together is essential for the success of the group. The OGF community has expertise in federation of widely scattered resources, which the DR community is only starting to address. We expect the cross-fertilization to help both communities advance.

4. Do the group's activities overlap inappropriately with those of another OGF group or to a group active in another organization such as IETF or W3C?
Not to our knowledge.

5. Are there sufficient interest and expertise in the group's topic, with at least several people willing to expend the effort that is likely to produce significant results over time?
Yes as exemplified by the workshop series that attracted between 30 and 60 attendees.

6. Does a base of interested consumers (e.g., application developers, Grid system implementers, industry partners, end-users) appear to exist for the planned work?
Work around federation of digital repositories exists in various academic communities. Instead of trying to manage a common security hierarchy, federation allows pair-wise agreements between repositories. In the grid community, federation has allowed grids with different security mechanisms and policies to interoperate, despite a lack of global security schemes. Digital repositories could take advantage of the infrastructure and agreements already in place for grids. Feedback from the research community following the OGF-Europe supported workshops has highlighted that the value of federation would have far-reaching benefits for the research community. In the commercial sector, the main interest lies in metadata handling in storage systems. Distributed, virtualized storage is becoming an issue with repository developers/managers as they increasingly need to support users who want to store large collections (images, video etc.). The grid community has struggled to define the need of metadata management and the digital repositories community could provide strong input to that effort. In addition, the metadata handling in current digital repositories can provide detailed use cases to be mined for commonality. Furthermore, there was general agreement at the OGF-Europe workshops that metadata management is ripe for standardization. The group aims to create interest in the commercial sector when more concrete plans have been established by the group. One option could be seeking interest with Microsoft Research, given their interest in repositories and cloud (Azure). Other cloud providers could also be contacted for collaboration.

7. Does the OGF have a reasonable role to play in the determination of the technology?
Yes, particularly on the storage side.

Active

The goal of the Digital Repositories Research Group (DR-RG) is to analyze how digital repositories can be built on top of federated storage infrastructure, focusing on the exploitation of existing data-related standards and the identification of need for new or revised data-related standards.