IGSN Technical Documentation of the IGSN

2017-09-28 IGSN Telecon

IGSN Telecon 2017-09-28

Participants:

  • Irina Bastrakova (GA)
  • Vera Bender (MARUM)
  • Megan Carter Orlando (IEDA)
  • Kirsten Elger (GFZ Potsdam)
  • Ulrich Harms (GFZ Potsdam)
  • Jens Klump (CSIRO)
  • Kerstin Lehnert (IEDA)
  • Anders Noren (LacCore)
  • Bernhard Peucker-Ehrenbrink (WHOI)
  • Damian Ulbricht (GFZ Potsdam)
  • Hans-Joachim Wallrabe-Adams (MARUM)

Agenda

  • IGSN e.V.
    • Update on new website
    • Progress on IGSN general paper
    • General Assembly 2017
  • IGSN Governance
    • Persistence of metadata catalogues
    • Technical committee
    • Guidelines for dealing with duplicate registrations
  • IGSN Technical Issues
    • igsn.org redirect
    • SSL certificate for IGSN redirect
    • Vocabulary service for metadata version 2
  • Future Development
    • White paper
    • Australian projects
    • German projects
  • Other

Notes

We need more information on this page: http://www.igsn.org/register-your-samples. For operating Allocating Agents, please send a brief (2-3 sentence description) including name, URL, and scope. Please also tell us whether the AA is currently accepting registrations from authors. If you supplied this information the last time I asked for it in March 2016 (KIGAM), please let us know if there are any updates.

Contract with freelance company, difficulties with international agreement. We are investigating whether Uli can set up a contract.

Trademark of IGSN costs ~3000-4000 euros. Uli reported that it may be <3000 euros. It is a fairly easy procedure. In which countries will the trademark be registered? In the US or Europe? Not necessary to do in both places. Since the organization is registered in Europe, we will register in Europe.

Kerstin, Kirsten, and Lesley met to work on IGSN paper at RDA last week. High-level overview paper appropriate for EOS. Work will continue over the next two weeks. After that time, further input from the rest of the IGSN e.V. will be requested.

IGSN e.V. General Assembly will occur at AGU in December in New Orleans, likely on the Sunday afternoon before.

Kerstin reported that the British Geological Survey and the US Geological Survey are both planning to become members of the IGSN e.V. We will contact them to encourage them to apply before the next General Assembly. Kerstin reported that IFREMER is talking with the CRNS in France about becoming a member, this process may not be as far along (application not expected before General Assembly in December).

Kerstin reported that an interest group on physical samples has been proposed at RDA

Technical Issues

How can we ensure that metadata catalogs at allocating agents are persistent, that they follow standard guidelines with respect to procedures?

Kerstin suggested a small working group to work on these issues

Jens recommended reading Kunze, J. et al., (2017). Persistence Statements: Describing Digital Stickiness. Data Science Journal. 16, p.39. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2017-039​. Many of the issues we are facing with the IGSN are not unique.

Jens said a big challenge is that we are all volunteering our time. It would be great to have staff on the editorial and governance side (people who are dedicated and motivated) and on the technical side. Kerstin has had conversations with the Sloan Foundation, they are interested in funding an effort - Kerstin suggested a 2-3 year period to have a dedicated person to take on many of the tasks. We also need to discuss a different business model to make the organization more sustainable. We were modeled after DataCite, but DataCite has changed a lot.

How to handle duplicate registrations (multiple IGSNs assigned to the same samples): what kind of linking is possible?

Technical WG needs reinvigorating. This would be an excellent topic for them to take on. Uli suggested that a small group of people be identified and tasks with drafting a plan to handle the duplicate registrations. Jens, Irina, Nick Car would be interested to do this. The use cases should be gathered from the different allocating agents that have had issues with duplicate registrations.

The Sloan Foundation would like a 2 page white paper on where we are with the IGSN and what we would like to do. Kerstin will work on a first draft. Anders: how much and for how long would Sloan be willing to fund? Kerstin: Sloan likes to fund efforts that address policies issues, rather than development efforts. Maybe $200K would be the maximum. The benefit is that overhead is very low. Perhaps a post-doc to work on putting together policies and documentation to be approved by the IGSN e.V., work on comparisons with other organizations with respect to business models, maintain the website. NSF has expressed some interest also. Anders offered to help.

http://www.igsn.org sends you to IGSN webpage. http://igsn.org redirects to the Handle System and triggers an error message that the handle does not resolve. top priority

Scholix insists on https instead of http. This is not an easy task.

Vocabulary Service: Irina reported that GA has started using a system that provides vocabulary service to create vocabularies and a collaboration tool. They have already created several vocabularies including for material. We would like to use this tool to grow vocabularies and map between terms. We would like to embed this in version 2 of the IGSN Metadata Schema.

Kerstin: what about governance? How much coordination is needed among the members versus how much we can leave to the individual members?

Jens: two sides. This is a tool that enables us to be semantically-richer than we are currently. This allows more flexibility to individual agents to select terms that fit their purpose. The service is hosted by ANDS. It has very finely granular access privileges, so the abilities to change and propose are tied to specific roles.

Kerstin: how dependent should we be on this? How are the services from ANDS made available and how persistent?

Irina: they just received continued funding, provides services across Australia, so fairly mature and stable. They are available on https://vocabs.ands.org.au/search/#!/?q=CGI (Note: there are 6 pages of them)

Kerstin mentioned IUGS?, a high-level organization that we should align with. They use GeoSciML. Would this be in competition?

We need a formal recommendation to be made to the entire IGSN e.V., at the General Assembly for input/approval. Kirsten would like to be a part of this, along with Irina and Jens and Damian.

Through nationally-based projects, we can contribute to the development of the IGSN. In Australia, two rounds of development have already been successful. One is the work on the portal (started in one round and about to be enhanced in a new round), the second is work with Curtin University on client software for IGSN registration that will also be open-source and should be reusable.

Jens reports that ANDS will likely become the registration agent for the academic center of Australia.

Kerstin: how can we provide information to the IGSN e.V. members and the broader community what software is available for them to adopt or where they can contribute? Is this through GitHub? Jens: GitHub is for the technical development. Communication and outreach should be through other means.

German projects? Jens encouraged German members to submit a proposal to German funding agency

Action items

Uli will determine exact cost of registering trademark.

Megan will poll members to determine who can attend the General Assembly at AGU and who may need a remote connection option.

Kerstin will draft white paper for Sloan Foundation about the current state and future directions of IGSN.

Kerstin, Kirsten, and Lesley will share EOS article draft

Megan and other AAs should share use cases with respect to duplicate registrations

Kerstin/Megan will contact Bob and others about igsn.org redirect issue - done