We were delighted to welcome David Flanders from JISC to Southampton on 29 Sept for a project meeting. The discussions were very wide-ranging, largley focussing on user requirements. We ran the first ever end-to-end EP2DC demo, a major milestone for the project!
 
 
A major milestone reached today by EPrints developer Seb. We now have EPrints talking to our materials data centre services for the first time via the REST interface, including data file upload using a PUT method.
 
 
After an anticipated delay and much preliminary discussion, the EP2DC team finally got together for a series of face-to-face meetings end August - the most productive of which was the curry at Kuti's in Southampton city centre ;-)

EP2DC aims to add a module to EPrints that allows experimental data to be captured together with the publication to which it corresponds, making use of tailored remote data centres to manage the experimental data.  While the EP2DC module will be designed to be data centre agnostic, the Materials Data Centre (another recent JISC-funded initiative at Southampton) provides the remote data centre against which the EP2DC module will be tested and refined.

The EP2DC project comprises three development sprints (data entry, data retrieval, and validation + packaging).  Although entrirely a University of Southampton efforts, the project is very much a cross-discipline, collective effort, involving EPrints Services, the Engineering Materials Department, and the MSIHPC.  As a result of the face-to-face meetings, three clearly defined stages to the first sprint have been identified—deployment and authentication, EPrints UX design and development, and integration.

Deployment and authentication—objective here is to deploy both EPrints and the MDC to a Shibboleth SSO infrastructure, the intention here being to integrate the EP2DC module into the UK HE repository infrastructure as seamlessly as possible.

EPrints UX design and development—the work concerns the reconfiguration of EPrints for an additional stage in the default workflow.  The additional stage allows XML-formatted data sets to be uploaded independently of the manuscripts (or more accurately, the unit of work) to which they belong.  This work is well advanced, and related documentation (design artifacts and prototype user interface) will be posted at the IE Demontrator site, with a corresponding posting at http://blog.iedemonstrator.org.

Integration—focus here is on delivering a range EPrints to data centre integration options that anticipate differing data transfer scenarios.  Presently HTTP POST and RESTful solutions are under development.

 
 
We've completed the REST endpoints for the MDC services. The EPrints team are now getting their end to talk to these services. REST for now, with SOAP/XML to follow shortly.
 
 
Check out Paul Walk's report on the JISC RI workshop held in Manchester last week.

Our EP2DC team were there and met a lot of great like-minded people. Thanks JISC and UKOLN for organising this!