Repositories and the grid come together

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In their daily work, researchers and information scientists are often forced to move back and forth between different digital environments. Institutional or thematic repositories have become a prevalent mechanism to manage publications, and increasingly also to manage research outputs and primary data. Integration of the user's natural work environment with repositories is improving (albeit slowly), and repository-based research environments are emerging (for example, eSciDoc). The natural habitat for many scientific users, however, is e-Infrastructure like the grid. At the same time, these users are employing repositories – often home-grown systems – to store their research outputs and publications.

A workshop series supported by OGF-Europe, DReSNeT and OMII-UK has set out to reduce this fragmentation and explore the interfaces between grid- and repository-based architectures. Four workshops have been held so far, at OGF23, DReSNeT, DCC 2008 and e-Science 2008, each attended by between 50 and 100 participants from a variety of backgrounds. Despite a tangible terminology gap between repository managers and some (research) users, the commonalities between requirements and the existing systems were astonishing. The main issues raised – preservation, good scientific practice, metadata and collection management – emphasise the tight integration of the repository with the user's work environment where the data is created. Reliable audit trails, metadata, and suchlike, can only be created if the users' work environments and repositories connect seamlessly. The federation of distinct repositories is obviously an important factor for achieving this. Users must not be required to deposit data multiple times, for example, into their institutional repository and into a thematic repository too. Protocols such as OAI-ORE are interesting as they resemble protocols dubbed grid in many ways. OAI-ORE allows for virtualisation of digital repositories just as the OGSA-DAI/DAIS protocols virtualises distributed databases.

Of course, repositories and the grid are not the only kinds of infrastructure available, but interweaving them is an essential step towards the simple and pragmatic plumbing the user is seeking. However, the time for pure experimentation is coming to an end for both repositories and the grid. The funding institutions represented at the workshops are looking for operational, trustworthy scientific repositories with many of the features described above. The next workshop of the series will be held at the Open Grid Forum 25, on 2-6 March 2009. Infrastructure may be of many kinds, but let's ensure that these infrastructures can interoperate.