ORCA Registry

From APSRWiki

1 Aims of the ORCA-Registry Project
2 Functional Architecture
3 Reference Group #2 Meeting Documents
4 Documents
5 Standards
6 Related Projects

[edit] Aims of the ORCA-Registry Project

As part of the APSR Collections Services and Infrastructures (COSI) framework, the Online Research Collections Australia (ORCA) Registry project has been established to improve the capacity of institutional repositories, archives, and data centres to create and share collection-level information and resources.

The aims of the ORCA-Registry project are to develop:

a discovery portal for collections information; that is, information about research collections
a services registry that can facilitate machine-to-machine services related to managing collections within a network of federated repositories

The main priority addressed by the ORCA-Registry is to provide better discovery environment for data collections produced by the wide range of individuals and institutions involved in the Australian innovation system. This includes all Australian higher education institutions; Government-funded research organisations (such as CSIRO); and commercial and not-for-profit organisations sectors with research interests (such as the archives, museums and libraries).

In defining the ORCA-Registry project, attention have been given to its interoperability with collections registries elsewhere. The most mature collections registry service is the Information Environment Service Registry (IESR) funded by the Joint Systems Information Committee (JISC) in the UK.

The other collections registry service, OCKHAM, is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as part of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) initiative. Links with these projects have been established in 2006 and they have been informed of ORCA-Registry project with a view to eventual collaboration in 2007-8.

Note that there is also an ORCA Support Network project that is designed to complement and enhance the ORCA-Registry project.

[edit] Functional Architecture

High-level Architecture

The overarching design of the ORCA-Registry conforms to a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The project components listed below are implemented using web services and related protocals and standards for data exchange and machine-to-machine interaction. Adopting this model will enable it to interoperate with the other APSR services under development, and registry services more widely.

The high level entities (Collections, Collection Services and Parties) in the ORCA-Registry data model conform to those set out in the ISO 2146 standard, but also includes an entity to facilitate the registration of repositories, archives and data centres.

It is assumed that the ORCA-Registry will operate in the context of a governance model for federated network of repositories and services in Australia, although such a model is to be developed as part of the Australian National Data Service proposed by NCRIS.

It is also assumed that the ORCA-Registry services will need to be accessed with the authentication, authorization and accounting framework to be established by the Australian Access Federation (AAF).

The functional components of the ORCA-Registry architecture that will be developed in the following order of priority:

1. ORCA administration. The internal management functions to be used by the administrators of the COSI services via a Web browser

2. Repository/collection registration and administration. The component of the ORCA-Registry application used by the administrators to record collection-level metadata from third party collection owners via a Web browser

3. Discovery portal. The Web browser user interface through which users can access (via browse and search) collection-level information

4. Repository interfaces. Machine-to-machine web-service interfaces will harvest collection-level metadata if, and only if, a collection-level metadata profile can be established for OAI-PMH, and this is supported by the leading repository software such as DSpace and Fedora

5. COSI modules. Machine-to-machine web-service interfaces to support interoperability with the AONS II and BEST services

6. Collection federation. Machine-to-machine web-service interfaces to support interoperability with IESR, OCKAM, and future collection registries

7. Collection Change Notification. Machine-to-machine web-service interfaces that automatically generate notifications to users via RSS (for example, about new collections that have been registered)

8. Downstream Services. Specified component, but not to be developed in 2007