Under the hood of 3TU.Datacentrum, a repository for research data.

Title: Under the hood of 3TU.Datacentrum, a repository for research data.

About the presenter: After a PhD in physics, Egbert Gramsbergen joined the Library of the Technical University Delft where he is responsible for most of the technology of the 3TU.Datacentrum, a joint repository for research data of the three Dutch technical universities.

Intended audience: technical-oriented

Abstract:
The 3TU.Datacentrum repository of research data hosts datasets as well as other objects representing measuring devices, locations, time periods and the like. Virtually all metadata is in rdf so the repository can be approached as an rdf graph. We will show how this is implemented with Fedora Commons, heavily leaning on rdf queries and xslt2.0. As a result of this architecture, it is relatively easy to make the repository linked-data-enabled by generating OAI/ORE resource maps.
While most of the metadata is rdf, most of the data is in NetCDF. Although not very well known in the library world, this is very popular format in various fields of science and engineering. It comes with its own data server Opendap which offers a rich API to interact with the data. Our repository is therefore a hybrid Fedora + Opendap setup and we will show how the two are integrated into a unified view and how they are kept in sync on ingest.