Register Locally-Discover Globally: The 2nd Global Registries Initiative Meeting

What: A meeting to discuss the establishment of a global network of registries to improve the interoperability of digital repositories and related data storage facilities.

Where: Southampton University, 'John Roberts Room' (located in the staff club) in building 38.

    Campus Map: http://www.soton.ac.uk/img/maps/Highfieldmap_nov07.pdf

When: Monday March 31, 2-5pm

Contact: chris.blackall@anu.edu.au or simon.porter@unimelb.edu.au

Download meeting invitation and agenda: (PDF)

NEW: Download Meeting Notes (PDF)

For information about the 1st Global Registries Initiative meeting, Washington, December 2007, see LINK

About the Meeting

The meeting will address the need for and feasibility of establishing a global network of registries that can aggregate, or federate, information about digital 'collections' and associated 'services' using metadata harvested from multiple sources.

The aims of the global network would be to make this information more discoverable by, and useful to, the research community and the general public and provide a shared framework to exploit the opportunities offered by Web 2.0 technologies.

When scaled internationally, it is anticipated that a network of collections and services registries would be particularly beneficial to the users of science and social science datasets and other scholarly curated databases, online collections, and complex digital objects from many disciplines, all of which are still largely invisible to most generic Web search engines.

The goal of a global network registries, therefore, would be to facilitate interdisciplinary research and stimulate innovation through the reuse of digital research resources in new contexts and knowledge domains. Again, in the context of an increasingly global research environment, the ability to scale such a network internationally is desirable for research communities who need increasingly to manipulate research materials from sources beyond their own community or domain.

For registry initiatives to succeed, it is clear that widespread engagement is required from the research community and a strong commitment to create scalable, standards-based, registry applications. Indeed, there are good business and administrative reasons for registry functions to be distributed, or 'federated', as an integral part of the emerging cyberinfrastructure fabric.

The initiative would harness the growing list of international Collections and Services Registry initiatives and provide a solid foundation for integrating these services with leading repository platforms, such as Fedora, DSpace and Eprints to name a few.