“How much do you know about SWORD?”

Dec 122011
 

We recently posted a survey about ‘Data Deposit’.  The survey is still open if you wish to respond.

The first question in the survey asks:

  • “How much do you know about SWORD?”
We asked this simple question as we wanted to find out the general level of knowledge about SWORD within the community who responded.  The survey was sent to various email lists with an interest in managing research data, SWORD, and repositories.  The following graph shows the responses to this question (survey responses as at 12/12/2011, number of responses = 35):
The responses confirm our suspicion that a lot of people have heard of SWORD and know what it does, but a reasonable proportion either haven’t heard of it, or don’t really know much about it.  So there is good news, and room for improvement in this result.
We’ll post further results from the survey over the next few weeks.

Survey: Depositing Research Data using SWORD

Dec 012011
 

The SWORD v2 project has been asked by the JISC to look into the applicability of the SWORD protocol for depositing Research Data.  The SWORD protocol has always been agnostic about the type of resource it is depositing, however its initial development stemmed from a requirement for the deposit of scholarly communications outputs into repositories – these typically being small text-based items.

In order to investigate how well SWORD and SWORD v2 would deal with Research Data, we need to know about the different types of research data that you are working with.  This will allow us to discover some of the range of different data types in use, and the general and specific requirements of each.

We’ve tried to keep the survey short – it is only 9 questions long.  If you have a few minutes to share some information with us about the data you work with, we would very much appreciate it.

Visit the survey at http://swordapp.org/sword-v2/sword-v2-data-deposit-survey/

SWORD extension project

Jul 152011
 

We’re glad to announce that the SWORD v2 project has been granted extension funding by JISC. The original SWORD v2 project has been extending the current SWORD standard from its current model of ‘fire and forget’ deposits, to a full CRUD model where items can be updated, replaced, or deleted too.  The project will deliver the new draft standard, server implementations for DSpace, EPrints and Fedora, along with client libraries in Java, PHP, Ruby, and Python.

For this extension to the project, the SWORD team is joining up with the SONEX team.  SONEX (Scholarly Output Notification and EXchange) have spent the past couple of years undertaking various activities, one of which has been identifying deposit opportunities within the scholarly communications environment.  The SWORD and SONEX teams have worked closely together in the past on exploring how SWORD can facilitate the deposit use cases identified by the SONEX work.

The extension project will be split into two halves:

  1. Explore the applicability of SWORD for dataset deposit
  2. Develop further clients to increase the adoption of SWORD v2

The first part of the extension project has already started.  Projects and researchers who have been working with dataset deposit into repositories are being contacted in order to find out more about the way that data transfer takes place, to see where SWORD could fit in.  In particular, projects of the JISC MRD (Managing Research Data) programme are being targeted.  Once this work has been completed, a gap analysis of their use cases and requirements will be compared with the functionality offered by SWORD.

Further details of the second part of the project will given in other blog posts in the near future – stay tuned: we’re looking for input in the form of ideas, possible systems to be enhanced with SWORD v2 functionality, and we’ll be seeking funded development parters.