Building repository interoperability and developer communities
Yesterday at the Library of Congress RepoCamp (that is repository camp) took place. The event was organised by the JISC Common Repository Interface Group (CRIG) and the supporting work led by WoCRIG (wisdom of CRIG). Some prize money was contributed by Microsoft for a developer competition.
The list of attendees at RepoCamp was pretty impressive. The majority were technical developers and some gave pitches on particular solutions and technologies that help repository interoperability; attendees at the Camp reviewed these pitches and gave feedback on the ideas. There was also an opportunity for everyone at RepoCamp to pitch prototypes and then to start to develop ideas together. A competition is being held where prizes are being given to motivate developers to develop prototypes. There is a particular focus on using OAI-ORE in ways that bring OAI-ORE functionality into user facing applications. The outcomes from the prototypes that enter into the competition will be judged on 8th August by a panel that includes: Savas Parastatidis (Microsoft), David Flanders (coordinator of WoCRIG), Rob Sanderson (University of Liverpool) and Tim DiLauro (John Hopkins University). Carl Lagoze, Herbert Van De Sompel and Simeon Warner (Cornell University) amongst others have helped organise the competition and event with JISC WoCRIG.
I didn’t go to the event so I don’t know how it went but by posting this I hope others will be able to follow links and see the outputs and get a sense of the discussions.
Prior to RepoCamp some developers from the UK have held a CRIG Roadshow in the US. The Roadshow has been focused on interoperability between repositories and eLearning (VLEs), eScience and eAdministration/Library systems. This has been a good way to bring UK and US developers together. After all these issues are global and not something to be dealt with solely within national boundaries.
The approach to WoCRIG has been a way to get technical developers talking and working together to review and develop specifications and solutions. The JISC vision (shared by many others worldwide) of a layer of scholarly content on the web, in part, underpinned by repositories is a challenging one and one way to help achieve this is by getting developers to define problem spaces in repository interoperability based on use cases and to undertake rapid prototyping and testing. JISC CRIG was originally established to help identify what use cases repositories need to support in research and learning and to suggest innovative solutions.
RepoCamp has built upon other CRIG work and meetings that have been held in the UK and the RepoChallenge that took place at Open Repositories 08 at Southampton University in April this year. That challenge was won by Mining for ORE by Ben O’Steen (University of Oxford), Dave Tarrant and Tim Brody (University of Southampton).
The JISC plans to hold a large scale developer event as part of the JISC Information Environment programmes in 2009.