JISC

The Orbital project will build on recent JISC-funded work at the University of Lincoln to develop a university research data management infrastructure, piloted with the first purpose-built School of Engineering in the UK in over 20 years. Working with the challenging requirements of our Engineering research staff and their industry partners, we will apply our experience and understanding of developing university-wide data-driven services to the implementation of a personalised, scalable, resilient and secure research data infrastructure. We intend to meet the requirements of this commercially sensitive research environment as well as to provide the facility to expose datasets through a discovery tool and public APIs made available on our existing http://data.lincoln.ac.uk service.

Aims and objectives 

The Orbital project will develop, test and implement a state-of-the-art research data management system, which meets both internal and external partner organisation's requirements in terms of robustness and security. We will apply a proven approach to the management of institutional data, through the proposed use of MongoDB (a very fast, flexible, schema-less database technology), to create flexible services for capturing, storing, preserving and sharing research data in real time across internal research groups and with external research partners via secure, public APIs. A personalised web interface for specific researcher profiles and a public discovery interface will also be developed.

Project methodology

We use an ‘agile’ approach to project management, so much of our work will be performed iteratively, relying on close engagement with our users. Therefore, the requirements analysis, technical development, documentation and dissemination of the deliverables is largely on-going throughout the project.

We will recruit two developers and anticipate that the Lead Developer post will be filled internally within the first month of the project. A further developer will join them in month seven. The Project will be led by a Project Manager working closely with a Lead Researcher and a Lead Web Developer, who will undertake the majority of the research in the initial six months of the project. From April 2012, development will begin in earnest with the recruitment of a further Web Developer.

Anticipated outputs and outcomes

We intend to develop a pilot infrastructure for managing research data for the university, with an initial emphasis on Engineering and STEM research data. This will include a Requirements Analysis, an Implementation Plan, the development and implementation of the infrastructure, as well as policies, guidance, support and a Business Plan to sustain the work of the project.

Technology / Standards used

MongoDB, HTML5, CSS3, OAuth, Spinx, CSV, XML, JSON and SQL, SWORD2.