Developers from the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton, and Oxford University have won a $5000 challenge competition which took place at the recently held OR08 Open Repositories international conference.
Dave Tarrant, Tim Brody (Southampton) and Ben O'Steen (Oxford), beat a large field of contenders, including finalists from the USA and Australia, by demonstrating that digital data can be moved easily between storage sites running different software while remaining accessible to users. This approach is projected to have important implications for data management and preservation on the Web.
Set by the Common Repository Interfaces Group (CRIG), the OR08 challenge had just one rule for the competition - the prototype created had to utilise two different 'repository' platforms. The winning demonstrator showed data being copied simply from an EPrints repository to a Fedora repository, and then moved back in the other direction. Among repository softwares, EPrints and Fedora are seen as being quite different in the way they handle data, so the approach used is likely to be just as useful with other repository software.
This data transfer was achieved using an emerging framework known as Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE), a topic that attracted one of the highest attendances at OR08. ORE is yet to appear in beta form, but specifications are being developed that allow distributed repositories to exchange information about their digital contents.
The members of the winning team are past and present members of the JISC Preserv 2 project that is investigating the provision of preservation services for institutional repositories.
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