Meeting Washington 2007

A meeting to pursue the idea of establishing a global network of collections and services registries to improve the interoperability of digital repositories and related data storage facilities.

Where: Renaissance Washington DC Hotel, Meeting Room 2 (the same venue as for the CNI Fall 2007 Task Force Meeting).

When: Dec. 10, 8:30am - 12noon (breakfast from 8am)

Who: The meeting is convened by the following people.

• Adrian Burton (co-convener), Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR);
• Jeremy Frumkin (co-convener), Oregon State University and the Ockham Initiative; and
• Ann Apps Information Environment Registry Service (IESR)

Contact: Jeremy Frumkin, Jeremy.frumkin@oregonstate.edu

About the Meeting

NEW: Washington 2007 Meeting Report Download PDF

NEW: Southampton 2008 Meeting Details

Meeting agenda: Download PDF

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

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 of collections and service 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.

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

A meeting to discuss this initiative is also timely because there is an opportunity to internationally implement the Dublin Core Collections Application Profile (DCCAP) recently established by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI).

The implementation of the Collections Application Profile would harness the existing work 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 but a few.

Questions for Discussion

How should an initiative to establish a global network of collections and services registries proceed?

To give direction to this effort, we invite the meeting attendees to consider some of the following questions:

• What elements of the global cyberinfrastructure fabric might be required to implement a network of interoperable collection and service registries?
• What stakeholder participation and governance models would be appropriate for such a network?
• What international policy, standards and regulatory frameworks are needed to ensure its ongoing integrity?
• How could it be sustainably maintained and funded?
• What are the relevant community engagement mechanisms to encourage data creators, data stewards and data consumers to use the registries?
• What is the right balance between centralized and distributed/federated registry models?

Goals of the meeting

1. To agree on the feasibility and need of a global network of interoperable collections and services registries;
2. To agree on mechanisms and collaborative frameworks for pursuing a global collections and services initiative; and
3. To identify stakeholders, supporters and funding opportunities for such a initiative.

Background

• Ockham Registry : Ockham Website
• IESR (Information Environment Services Registry) : IESR Website : Service Registries Blog
• ORCA (Open Research Collections Australia) Registry : ORCA Registry Wiki

Meeting FAQ