Savas Parastatidis announces the announcement of a platform from Microsoft to support ‘research output repositories’.
At the Open Repositories 2008 conference, we will formally unveil our work in advance of its official release and initiate interactions/exchanges with the DSpace, EPrints, Fedora, and other players in the repository community. This is crucial to us because—like every other project our group undertakes—we are intensely focused on interoperability. [ – Microsoft and “Research-Output” Repositories]
Read the full post for a better sense of what they are working on, but here are some excerpts.
We are looking forward to sharing our efforts over the last few months. We have been working hard on a platform for building repository-related services and tools. Our goal is to abstract the use of underlying technologies and provide an easy-to-use development model, based on .NET and LINQ, for building repositories on top of robust technologies. [ – Microsoft and “Research-Output” Repositories]
I want to be very transparent here: our effort is intended to provide a repository option to those institutions/organizations that already license or have access to Microsoft software (including the free versions of the products, like SQL Server Express). Our platform is intended to sit on top of the existing Microsoft “stack”. By providing this new research-output repository platform at no cost, we can offer added value for our existing (and future) customers in the academic and research space. It is critical to point out that we are making every effort to ensure our platform is optimized to make the best use of Microsoft technologies AND to also interoperate with all other existing systems and platforms in the repository ecosystem. We are actively seeking engagement and feedback from the community! [ – Microsoft and “Research-Output” Repositories]
We are already well into the process of developing a collection of tools and interfaces on top of the platform as tangible examples of how to use it. We already have implementations of OAI-PMH, BibTeX import/export, customized feed syndication service, ASP.NET controls providing access to the repository, and working on Search and a simple Web UI. We are also working on WPF and Silverlight tools for visualizing the relationships between the resources within our repository. [ – Microsoft and “Research-Output” Repositories]
Check out his entry on the age of semantics also.
This initiative comes from the Technical Computing area at Microsoft.
Welcome to Technical Computing at Microsoft, our company-wide effort to collaborate with the global scientific community. As modern science increasingly relies on integrated information technologies to collect, process, and analyze complex data, we believe that the Computer Science research community and Microsoft technologies can assist scientists make breakthrough discoveries. [Technical Computing @Microsoft – Vision]
One of the issues institutions have with current repository software is the difficulty of working with it ‘out of the box’. It will be interesting to see whether this offering helps here.
Via Merrilee Proffitt.
