Meeting between MPIWG group & eSciDoc team members, 16-17 October, Munich

MPIWG participants: R. Casties, M. Hyman, W. Schmidle, K. Thoden, J. Willenborg

eSciDoc architecture as of 2008-10-16

• three layers
  • common functionality
    • generalized and unified data model for all content resources
    • content modeling of resources as a specialization instrument
    • versioning
    • PID
      • currently a political problem; to be implemented really for faces etc. by year-end
    • user management, authentication and authorization
  • intermediate services (added functionality)
    • duplicate detection
    • image handling
    • metadata handler
    • validation of data
    • retrieval/download statistics
    • workflow management
  • application services (can be integrated)
    • depositing
    • publishing
    • quality assurance
    • citation manager
    • export manager
    • SearchAndOutput
    • controlled vocabularies
• use of Fedora
  • Fedora has its own versioning model
  • versioning model is component-level
  • no version numbers (data-based versioning)
  • core services of eSciDoc implement versioning independently
  • an eSciDoc item may be more than one Fedora object
• three stages
  • pending
  • submitted (some quality control)
  • released (a published, valid object)
    • after release an object cannot be deleted (to ensure persistence)

• interfaces
  • SOAP and REST

Overall evaluation

• core eSciDoc services
  • may be of some use, but developed functionality remains unclear
  • scheduled release date for 1.0 is Q1 2009
  • missing features
    • e.g. notification mechanism (for letting us know that a relevant document has been created or modified)
  • design features & flaws
• solutions (links below may break at any time, since they are to demo resources)
  • ​Faces (MPI for Human Development)
  • ​Virtueller Raum Reichsrecht (MPI for European History of Law)
  • ​PubMan
• comments
  • partner institutions for which a solution is being developed are "privileged"
  • no public or stable repository exists yet
  • future of project is unclear
  • need to reevaluate situation in Q1 2009