A centre of expertise in digital information management An analysis of Digital Repository Scenarios, Use Cases and Workflows

A centre of expertise in digital information management

www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories

An analysis of Digital Repository Scenarios, Use Cases and Workflows

Preliminary FindingsPlenary Session 5: InteroperabilityThursday 25th January 2007, Open Repositories Conference 2007, San Antonio, Texas

www.bath.ac.uk

UKOLN is supported by:

Mahendra MaheyRepositories Research TeamJulie Allinson, Rachel Heery and Robert John RobertsonUKOLN and CETIS



Overview• Background• Methodology – Preliminary Findings• Other approaches • Extracting internal functions and interactions with

external services, flow of information between systems

• Ecology• E-framework• Conclusions



Funded the Digital Repositories Programme in the UK (2005 – 2008)

Phase 1

Joint Information Systems Committee – UK government funding organisation promoting and implementing IT technology in Further (Community College) and Higher Education (Universities)

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_digital_repositories.aspx

27 Projectsresearch, learning, information services, institutional policy, management and administration, records management



• Metadata standards• Metadata quality• Persistent identifiers• Version control• Quality assurance• Benchmarking

– (Building trusted repositories)• Provenance/Ownership• Legal issues• User requirements

Project Priorities

E-learning

Data Repositories

Most of the projects can be groupedinto these broad areas

Images

E-theses

Legal andPolicy

Issues

Preservation

Integrating

infrastructure

Clusters



ASK

CLADDIER GRADE

CDLOR

IRS

IRIScotland

MIDESS PERX PROWE: R4L RepoMMan

SPECTRa

SPIRE

STORE

Trust DR

UKCollab

UserNeeds

VERSIONSEThOS GNU

Eprints

IRRA

CommunityImage

Archive

RightsRewards

SHERPAPlus

OpenDOAR

FrameworkFor Medical

Images

RepositoryBridge

RepositoriesResearch

Team



Achieving Interoperability in an Open World of Repositories?

Librarians

Scientists

Researchers

Teachers

Different People

Open Access to Research Papers

Learning and Teaching

Different Domains

Open Access to Research Data

Universities (Higher Education)

Government

School

Community Colleges (Further Education) Contexts

DepartmentalLearning ObjectsResearch Output

Data

Difficult to identify when and IF interoperability should occur



Many projects needed to gather requirements…

Where to begin…?



Some projects had already started…• ASK project was working following John’s

Hopkins • A Technology Analysis of Repository

Services• More on this later...



Projects needed to collect and document requirements

• Scenarios and Use Cases• UML (Universal Modelling Language) • Workflows (some projects already started, but training to be

given in BPMN (Business Process Modelling Notation – Phase 1 and 2, in March)

• Research Team provided TRAINING to Projects• Main aims:

– Learn how to write and use Scenarios, Use Cases, UML, Workflows– Can be collected across projects using common templates and notation, for future

analysis



Writing effective scenarios and use cases

• Many approaches out there!• Decided on Alistair Cockburn’s work

– Writing Effective Scenarios and Use Cases– Approach seemed simple and well respected– Used trainers that had implemented a repository

system using this approach • Intrallect• LADIE (JISC Project)

– Experiences both good and bad of using scenarios and use cases for gathering requirements

ISBN:0201702258Alistair Cockburn

4.5 Stars on Amazon!



Training Materials available on our Wiki

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Useful_Resources

•Please feel free to use



Example templates

Scenarios

Use Cases



Who were the authors of the Scenarios and Use Cases?• Mainly project staff who had received the

training• Some of the scenarios based on surveys

and interviews with staff in institutions



How Features and Interactions extracted• Long laborious process, very time consuming• Implicit process

– Read, Interpret, Agree• Not always clear to establish explicit connection between scenarios, use cases (even

after training!!)• Writing a use case is much more difficult• 4 times more scenarios than use cases collected• Not finished yet, more to be collected and analysed• Need to go back to many authors to get agreement

– Still ongoing• Scenarios can be ‘hit and miss’, even if they are controlled, yet appealing because

they are the easiest to get– Two way process – they communicate an idea and sometimes it is necessary to make sure you

have understood– There are better story tellers out there than others– Some loose the plot (not mentioning any names)

• Not always about repositories!!• Can be difficult to analyse• Similar problems found with John Hopkin’s work



Features



CRUD is a

GIVEN

CreateRetrieve

UpdateDelete



Features Identified – similar to previous work• Storage

– Add, Access, Remove Data and Manage Metadata• Aggregations

– Create and Remove, Change membership and Find• Management

– Bulk ingest and export• Security

– Authentication and Access control, User Management, Policy Management

• Locking• Virtual Object Representation• Transactions (e.g. updating objects)• Versioning• Searching



A snap shot of features…



Versions

ferret_behaviour_02_03_05.pdf

ferret_behaviour_02_07_05.pdf

Publisher VersionFerret Behaviour(includes graphic images)

Open Access VersionClosest to Publisher VersionFerret Behaviour(just images missing)

Version 1

Version 2

Version 3

Version 4

Finding the treasure in versions

Permanence of file location

Enough metadata to distinguish between versionsIn search results without opening file

Version labelling simple and easy



One click publish from RepositoryTo VLE (CMS)

Interactions with other systems

IMS SCORMContent

VLE Repository

IMS QTIContent

? ?

??

QTISystems

Repository

Research ExpertiseDatabase

Repository

Bulk importLinks to Full

text via ID

Updates

Not full functionality, too complex!

PDA VLERepository



Learning and Teaching Repositories

Bulk ImportLearningObjects Repository

Open Access in Learning and Teaching MaterialsRepositories (Internal/External), Peer Review (Anonymous)OAIPMH compliant Learning Object RepositoriesHarvest Metadata regularly from other repositories

Seamless Extra securityFor sensitiveMaterials and Specific GroupsShibboleth

DisaggregatingLearning Objects

Into Assets for reuseIn a repository

Star Ratings

Communities of PracticeAssess Materials

Comments !©Identify modifiable contentLicense on reuse

RSSE-mail

Delayed feedbackAbout resource

ResourceChanged

Links to Materials via E-mail, RSS

Moderation



Geospatial data

Search using GUILinks to other servicesGazetteer – for keywordsearchingGeo referencing80% of all data has GeoComponent in itSo why not put it in?



Repositories in the Laboratory



Lab equipment feeds data directlyInto a Lab Repository

DEPOSIT Probity service maintains priority of discoveryTime Stamping, The Researcher

Web

OAI OAI Dissemination of data metadata (E-bank)

Dataset Dataset

Dataset Dataset

Data and analysisintegrated into articleand linked back to dataarchive.

OAI dissemination ofdocument metadata(EPrints UK) plus datacitations.

Paper Paper

PaperPaper

From R4L project website



Digital Resource Aggregator

Leaving Institution?Download all your files

Into a single Zip

Assign different levelsOf Metadata which can be viewed by

Different groupse.g. school,university

Others



Deposit – see Deposit API work

• Mediated deposit – one page eazi deposit into mediated deposit queue

• Deposit clone using arxiv –easi deposit script

• Make deposit of final theses into repository a condition of graduation



Ecology

•Identified features will provide•More evidence for Ecology •Potential interactions



E-frameworkhttp://www.e-framework.org/• E-framework, SOA approach to building

systems with small components• Deposit or ‘Add’ will feature in this – see

previous presentation• Possibly more



Conclusions• Scenarios, use cases and workflows are very useful for

gathering requirements• Scenarios are perhaps the easiest to get from non

specialists• For Scenarios to be useful you need to know what you need

the story for, otherwise you may not get a particularly useful story

• Go back to the authors and show them what implicit assumptions you have made and see if you interpreted it correctly

• A scenario is meant to communicate with the user, and communication is a two way process after all

• Useful for lots of projects to get a focus of what you need something for, or what you would like.



Telling a story – Scenarios

• People don’t always tell you the right stories– Interesting – yes– Not always relevant– Imprecise– Need to go back and ask what they meant

• Lowering the barrier to get stories from users is good but then there is ‘drift’

• Users need to know what story they are supposed to tell

• Keep them on focus!



Further work

• Go back to many authors• Communicate functionality with developers

of repositories • Ecology and E-framework• More to collect!!• More workflows to Analyse• Paper to be written at end of project



The moral…

A well told story is always better to analyse than a badly told one.



Thanks …

Presentation available from:

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Useful_Resources

<[email protected]>

<[email protected]>

<[email protected]>

<[email protected]>

Documents

A centre of expertise in digital information management An analysis of Digital Repository Scenarios, Use Cases and Workflows