Category: update

Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun

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Courtesy of Stephanie Simms at CDL, here’s our bi-monthly update on all things DMP
 
Image credit: Jon Baglo CC-BY-NC-ND
 
Our DMPTool and DMPonline services have been humming along with the same underlying code for a couple of months now. Since our MVP release, we’ve shifted gears to more regular sprints. We’re also pleasantly surprised by how eager the wider DMP community has been to join forces in migrating, translating, and even contributing new features already!
 
Here’s a brief retrospective and a glimpse into the future.
 
Post MVP Backlog
 
There is a modest backlog of work that didn’t make into the MVP release. We’ve prioritized these issues and are focused on tying up the loose ends over the coming months. Those following the DMPRoadmap Github repository will notice more regular releases. The goal is to settle into a steady two-week rhythm, but in the near term we’re working on slightly shorter or longer cycles to address critical bugs and some minor refactoring. Many thanks to our users on both sides of the pond who have reported issues and provided overwhelmingly positive feedback so far!
 
Evolving processes
 
We’ve been communicating with our respective user communities about new fixes and features as things pertain to them. Some things to note about our evolving development process: 
 
  • DMPRoadmap GitHub repo: this is where most development work happens since the majority of fixes and features apply to the core codebase. This repository also contains all technical documentation, release notes, and other info for those interested in deploying their own instances or contributing to the project. 
  • The DMPRoadmap wiki has a list of potential future enhancements. We’re collating ideas here and will define priorities and requirements in consultation with the community via user groups and listserv discussions. If you have other desired new features please let us know.
  • Any service-specific customizations reside in separate GitHub repos. For example you can find the custom Single-Sign-On code in the DMPTool GitHub repo. The way in which we handle helpdesk functions varies too. DMPTool users can report issues directly in the DMPTool repo or via the helpdesk. If something pertains to the common codebase, Stephanie will tag the issue and transfer it to DMPRoadmap. For DMPonline users we ask you to report issues via the dmponline@dcc.ac.uk helpdesk. 
External contributions
 
Our core dev team is test driving the external contributor guidelines with the French team from DMP OPIDoR. They developed a new feature for a global notification system (e.g., to display maintenance messages, updates to funder templates) that happens to be in our backlog. The new feature looks great and is exactly the kind of contribution we’d like from others. You’ll see it in the next release. Thanks Benjamin and Quentin!
 
We’re also keen to commence monthly community dev calls to learn about other new features that folks might be planning and keep track of how we collaborate on DMP support across the globe.
 
Translations
 
We’ll be adding a new translation for Brazilian Portuguese (thanks to Benilton de Sá Carvalho and colleagues at UNICAMP!) and Finnish thanks to DMPTuuli. We’re also reaching out to fill in missing portions of existing translations for other languages since we added so many new features. New translations are always welcome; more information is available on the GitHub wiki and/or contact us.
 
A machine-actionable future
 
With the launch milestone behind us, we’re devoting more attention and resources to creating a machine-actionable future for DMPs. Two working groups hosted productive sessions at the recent RDA plenary (DMP Common Standards, Exposing DMPs) that included lightning talk presentations by members of the DMPRoadmap project (slides 44-51). Both of the groups are on track to provide actionable outputs in the next 12 months that will bolster wider community efforts on this front. We will continue participating in both groups as well as begin prototyping things with the NSF EAGER grant awarded to the California Digital Library. Stay tuned for more details via future updates and check out the activedmps.org site to get involved.

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Finding our Roadmap rhythm

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In keeping with our monthly updates about the merged Roadmap platform, here’s the short and the long of what we’ve been up to lately courtesy of Stephanie Simms of the DMPTool:

Short update

Long(er) update

This month our main focus has been on getting into a steady 2-week sprint groove that you can track on our GitHub Projects board. DCC/DMPonline is keen to migrate to the new codebase so in preparation we’re revising the database schema and optimizing the code. This clean-up work not only makes things easier for our core development team, but will facilitate community development efforts down the line. It also addresses some scalability issues that we encountered during a week of heavy use on the hosted instance of the Finnish DMPTuuli (thanks for the lessons learned, Finland!). We’ve also been evaluating dependencies and fixing all the bugs introduced by the recent Rails and Bootstrap migrations.

Once things are in good working order, DMPonline will complete their migration and we’ll shift focus to adding new features from the MVP roadmap. DMPTool won’t migrate to the new system until we’ve added everything on the list and conducted testing with our institutional partners from the steering committee. The CDL UX team is also helping us redesign some things, with particular attention to internationalization and improving accessibility for users with disabilities.

The rest of our activities revolve around gathering requirements and refining some use cases for machine-actionable DMPs. This runs the gamut from big-picture brainstorming to targeted work on features that we’ll implement in the new platform. The first step to achieving the latter involves a collaboration with Substance.io to implement a new text editor (Substance Forms). The new editor offers increased functionality, a framework for future work on machine-actionability, and delivers a better user experience throughout the platform. In addition, we’re refining the DMPonline themes (details here)—we’re still collecting feedback and are grateful to all those who have weighed in so far. Sarah and I will consolidate community input and share the new set of themes during the first meeting of a DDI working group to create a DMP vocabulary. We plan to coordinate our work on the themes with this parallel effort—more details as things get moving on that front in Nov.

Future brainstorming events include PIDapalooza—come to Iceland and share your ideas about persistent identifiers in DMPs!—and the International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC) 2017 for which registration is now open. We’ll present a Roadmap update at IDCC along with a demo of the new system. In addition, we’re hosting an interactive workshop for developers et al. to help us envision (and plan for) a perfect DMP world with tools and services that support FAIR, machine-actionable DMPs (more details forthcoming).

Two final, related bits of info: 1) we’re still seeking funding to speed up progress toward building machine-actionable DMP infrastructure; we weren’t successful with our Open Science Prize application but are hoping for better news on an IMLS preliminary proposal (both available here). 2) We’re also continuing to promote greater openness with DMPs; one approach involves expanding the RIO Journal Collection of exemplary plans. Check out the latest plan from Ethan White that also lives on GitHub and send us your thoughts on DMP workflows, publishing and sharing DMPs.

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Data Conservancy Update!

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  The Data Conservancy team has been busy refactoring our core infrastructure and extending our software offerings. Based on lessons learned from a robust R&D program and community-adopted software development, we strive to develop solutions that address not only our preservation needs, but …

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Data Conservancy Update!

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  The Data Conservancy team has been busy refactoring our core infrastructure and extending our software offerings. Based on lessons learned from a robust R&D program and community-adopted software development, we strive to develop solutions that address not only our preservation needs, but …

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Data Conservancy Update!

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  The Data Conservancy team has been busy refactoring our core infrastructure and extending our software offerings. Based on lessons learned from a robust R&D program and community-adopted software development, we strive to develop solutions that address not only our preservation needs, but …

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Getting our ducks in a row

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Recent activity on the Roadmap project encompasses two major themes: 1) machine-actionable data management plans and 2) kicking off co-development of the shared codebase.

Image credit: ‘Get Your Ducks in a Row‘ CC-BY-SA by Cliff Johnson

Machine-actionable DMPs

The first of these has been a hot topic of conversation among stakeholders in the data management game for some time now, although most use the phrase “machine-readable DMPs.” So what do we mean by machine-actionable DMPs? Per the Data Documentation Initiative definition, “this term refers to information that is structured in a consistent way so that machines can be programmed against the structure.” The goal of machine-actionable DMPs, then, is to better facilitate good data management and reuse practices (think FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) by enabling:

  • Institutions to manage their data
  • Funders to mine the DMPs they receive
  • Infrastructure providers to plan their resources
  • Researchers to discover data

This term is consistent with the Research Data Alliance Active DMPs Interest Group and the FORCE11 FAIR DMPs group mission statements, and it seems to capture what we’re all thinking: i.e., we want to move beyond static text files to a dynamic inventory of digital research methods, protocols, environments, software, articles, data… One reason for the DMPonline-DMPTool merger is to develop a core infrastructure for implementing use cases that make this possible. We still need a human-readable document with a narrative, but underneath the DMP could have more thematic richness with value for all stakeholders.

A recent Cern/RDA workshop presented the perfect opportunity to consolidate our notes and ideas. In addition to the Roadmap project members, Daniel Mietchen (NIH) and Angus Whyte (DCC) participated in the exercise. We conducted a survey of previous work on the topic (we know we didn’t capture everything so please alert us to things we missed) and began outlining concrete use cases for machine-actionable DMPs, which we plan to develop further through community engagement over the coming months. Another crucial piece of our presentation was a call to make DMPs public, open, discoverable resources. We highlighted existing efforts to promote public DMPs (e.g., the DMPTool Public DMPs list, publishing exemplary DMPs in RIO Journal) but these are just a drop in the bucket compared to what we might be able to do if all DMPs were open by default.  

You can review our slides here. And please send feedback—we want to know what you think!

Let the co-development begin!

Now for the second news item: our ducks are all in a row and work is underway on the shared Roadmap codebase.

We open with a wistful farewell to Marta Ribeiro, who is moving on to an exciting new gig at the Urban Big Data Centre. DCC has hired two new developers to join our ranks—Ray Carrick and Jimmy Angelakos—both from their sister team at EDINA. The finalized co-development team commenced weekly check-in calls and in the next week or two we’ll begin testing the draft co-development process by adding three features from the roadmap:

  1. Enhanced institutional branding
  2. Funder template export
  3. OAuth link an ORCID

In the meantime, Brian is completing the migration to Rails 4.2 and both teams are getting our development environments in place. Our intention is to iterate on the process for a few sprints, iron out the kinks, and then use it and the roadmap as the touchstones for a monthly community developer check-in call. We hope this will provide a forum for sharing use cases and plans for future work (on all instances of the tool) in order to prioritize, coordinate, and alleviate duplication of effort.

The DCC interns have also been plugging away at their respective projects. Sam Rust just finished building some APIs on creating plans and extracting guidance, and is now starting work on the statistics use case. Damodar Sójka meanwhile is completing the internationalization project, drawing from work done by the Canadian DMP Assistant team. We’ll share more details about their work once we roll it back into the main codebase.

Next month the UC Berkeley Web Services team will evaluate the current version of DMPonline to flag any accessibility issues that need to be addressed in the new system. We’ve also been consulting with Rachael Hu on UX strategy. We’re keeping track of requests for the new system and invite you to submit feedback via GitHub issues.

Stay tuned to GitHub and our blog channels for more documentation and regular progress updates.

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New Season, New Viewshare

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The following is a guest post by NDIIPP summer intern Elizabeth Tobey. Liz is a graduate student in the Masters of Library Science program at the University of Maryland. Along with the fall weather, food, activities and the new layer of clothes that are now necessary, this season also brings us a new and improved Viewshare. […]

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