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Use case documentation for the RMap Project

This project contains documentation describing the RMap Project including the grant proposal, use cases, and communication materials. The RMap Project was an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation-funded initiative undertaken by the Data Conservancy, Portico, and IEEE. The goal of the RMap Project was to produce a prototype framework that makes it possible to preserve the many-to-many complex relationships among scholarly publications and their underlying data, thereby supporting the continual development of scholarly communication and digital publishing.

Johns Hopkins University, the University of Notre Dame, Duraspace, and the Center for Open Science have collaborated to create an integration between the OSF and Fedora to bring preservation into the active research lifecycle.

Today's scholarly works can be dynamic, distributed, and complex. They can consist of multiple related components (article, dataset, software, multimedia, webpage, etc.) that are made available asynchronously, assigned a range of identifiers, and stored in different repositories with uneven preservation policies. A lot of progress has been made to simplify the process of sharing the components of these new forms of scholarly output and to improve the methods of preserving diverse formats. As the complexity of a scholarly works grows, however, it becomes unlikely that all of the components will become available at the same time, be accessible through a single repository, or even stay in the same state as they were at the time of publication. In turn, it also becomes more challenging to maintain a comprehensive and current perspective on what the complete work consists of and where all of the components can be found. It is this challenge that makes it valuable to also capture and preserve the map of relationships amongst these distributed resources. The goal of the RMap project was to build a prototype service that can capture and preserve the maps of relationships found amongst these distributed works. The outcomes of the RMap project and its possible applications for preservation are described.

Traditionally, the pluggable storage interface in Fedora has followed a "low-level" paradigm where objects and datastreams are presented to the storage layer as independent, anonymous blobs of data. This arrangement has proven simple, reliable, and generally flexible. In the past few years however, there has been an increasing need for Fedora to mediate storage in more complex scenarios. Managing large numbers of big datastreams, multiplexing storage between different devices or cloud storage, and archiving content in a transparent manner are tasks that are difficult to achieve through Fedora currently., International Conference on Open Repositories : Proceedings, The 5th International Conference on Open Repositories (OR2010), Madrid, Spain, 6-9 July 2010