Tobias has been invited to give a keynote at the eSciDoc days at FIZ Karlsruhe on "Virtual Environments - How can infrastructure matter to research?": http://www.escidoc.org/media/docs/escidoc-days-2009/keynote-blanke.pdf

Mark and Tobias have been involved in setting up a Scholars Workbench Solutions Community - together with Chris Awre and Richard Green from Hull and Thornton Staples from Fedora Commons. After some very productive telephone conferences and meetings, we came up with a mission statement.

Basically, the community should bring together researchers and developers interested in providing e-Research solutions based on the Fedora Commons systems and other digital repository systems.

You can find details here: http://www.fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/FCCWG/Scholars+Workbenc...

Following on from the digital repository workshops at OGF, Mark and Tobias have been involved in setting up a research group on Digital Repositories at OGF.

The goal of the Digital Repositories Research Group (DR-RG) is to analyze how digital repositories can be built on top of federated storage infrastructure, focusing on the exploitation of existing data-related standards and the identification of need for new or revised data-related standards.

Last week, Mark and Tobias visited the wonderful D4Science project at CNR in Pisa/Italy. We had an impressive presentation on their repository tools and services in the context of the gCube: http://www.d4science.eu/. It was exciting to see how data-driven research using repositories features in the European infrastructure EGEE.

We arranged further collaborations with D4Science in the context of the European infrastructure project we are working on called DARIAH (http://www.dariah.eu): http://www.beliefproject.org/Members/D4Science/my_news/reporting-on-the-...

Announcement of Research Tutorials at the IEEE Conference on Digital Ecosystems

As research increasingly relies on digital ecosystem for their research, the development and provisioning of a suitable infrastructure and of tools that can serve as habitats and agents for the various research communities has emerged as one of the challenges for the computing science.

The scope of the workshops and the associated briefing material assumed that federated access management is a requirement for repositories; it did not infer this as a solution to previously-identified requirements. This assumption was made by JISC as a pragmatic approach to developing a tentative programme of work, which will be subject to further iterative development.

EPSRC DReSNet: Digital Repositories in e-Science

Kick-off meeting

Culture Lab, University of Newcastle

November 4th, 2008

Presentations

Mark Hedges and Tobias Blanke (King's College London): "Targets of DReSNet and overview of a research agenda for Digital Repositories in e-Science and e-Research"

The first presentation by Mark Hedges presented the Network’s aims and objectives and reported on activities so far:

• Mark presented at OGF 21 in Barcelona at the workshop on Digital Repositories.

Repository Curation Service Environments (RECURSE) Workshop

4th International Digital Curation Conference
1 December 2008
Hilton Edinburgh Grosvenor Hotel, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

This workshop, jointly supported by OGF-Europe, OMII-UK and DReSNeT, aims to address the specific requirements for Digital Repository curation service environments.

Special Session at the 4th IEEE International Conference on e-Science

December 12, 2008, Indianapolis, USA

Morning Session

9.30am-10.30am

Keynote by David de Roure (Southampton) - How Repositories can Learn from the Failings of the Grid

10:30am-10:45am

Virtual Poster Presentation: Aschenbrenner, Andreas; Blanke, Tobias; Hedges, Mark - Synergies between Grid and Repository Technologies - a Methodical Mapping

Abstract

High Energy Physics has been the leading research domain when it comes to e-Science. It has however been less involved in the digital preservation agenda. This might change now, as computer weekly reports. They interviewed Physicist Rolf-Dieter Heuer, who becomes CERN director general in January.

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/08/06/231762/in-search-of-th...