ECDL 2006 - DLSci06 - eSciDoc

eSciDoc - a Scholarly Information and Communication Platform in the Age of eScience
Matthias Razum

This was a very good presentation.  I particularly appreciated the silo diagram.

http://www.escidoc-project.de/homepage.html

Scholarly Communication - Rip, Mix, Burn

* Scholarship inherently recursive
* Therefore scholars are both information consumers and information producers at the same time
* Referencing or reusing material of all times enables scholars o weave a knowledge network of related information objects
* Good scientific practice requires provenance data for objects and versioning

Example: Knowledge Network around cuneiform tablet

* Metadata
* Transcription - Metadata
  - Translation - Metadata
  - Annotation

[wonderful silo diagram]

What should an institutional repository be?

* institutional memory
* allow for reuse - allow for associating information objects in novel contexts
* support interdisciplinary work
* open, application-independent and flexible,
  thus laying the ground today for repurposing the information in future applications

Turning Static Objects into Living Knowledge

* e-Scholarship ( = e-science = e-research ) allows to publish all intermeidate results of knowledge
  generation from first ideas, theories, discussions with peers to final results
* need to support users early in their work process, so they can share immediately with peers
* leads to interactive authoring environments with support for collaboration and annotations
* objects lose their static nature and become 'active nodes' in a network of knowledge

Q (Rachel): How to connect from a wiki to an institutional repository?
A: Maybe it is possible.  There was a project - NSDL - wiki based on Fedora.

eSciDoc
* 6 million euro five-year grant (2004-2009)
* aim to build an integrated information, communication and publishing platform for web-based
  scientific work
* NOT a research project, aims at stablishing an innovative production system

[diagram]

* Repository at the core
* layer of services
* layer of security
* build apps on top of these
  - publication management
  - scholarly workbench
  - eLib
  - eLab Journal

  helper apps: user management

ideally, the scientists should be able to build apps on this platform

Publication Management

* Workflows
  - very complex - every institution different
* Metadata
  - everyone has their own idea what the correct scheme is

Scholarly Workbench

* collaboration, for humanities

eLib

* dark archive of all commercially-licensed content
(postponed)

eLabJournal

(postponed)

Services
* Object Manager
* Content Type Modeler
* Metadata Modeler
* Formats Manager
* Workflow Manager
* Data Interopability
* Search & Browse
* License Management
* Personalization
* Basket Manager

Q (me): To what extent does it depend on Fedora?
A: In theory the services deal with the repository as an abstract layer, but in practice currently
   you must have Fedora

Framework Services

* The framework is an enabling technology
  - scholars can focus on domain-specific application logic
  - enable scholars to focus on their "business logic" / "scholarly logic"

Content Model

Q (Rachel): Are you using RDF containers?
A: Conceptually we are using METS containers.
Comment (Jane): Fedora uses RDF internally.

* some generic object patterns

* ability to attach licenses to content items

* ability to manage content item versions