A meeting from the DAMS team made me generate these notes. The project is ambitious and has many points to be a successful one. I’m still not fully involved in the project and I hope that this will happen soon.
The project and services pages is at http://damssupport.ouls.ox.ac.uk/trac and more specific about the DAMS project can be also seen in this page.
The trac system is used, which is equivalent to a wiki, allows attaching files, code sub-vsn, tickets (bug tracking), roadmap (milestones), etc. It is also an event management system and is unique place to all projects.
Why use the trac system?
- JISC accepts blogs and wikis as documentation
- has RSS feeds for timeline changes
- XSLT >> reports
- backend is in Python, currently in VMWare
Vocabulary used as standard and created by projects will be at http://vocab.ouls.ox.ac.uk/
Event-message system
The filesystem has the structure:
JMS – Java messaging system, queue with msgs (stack)
AMQP – email msg type
RabbitMQ (silent: success, noise: fail) – indexes, specify in advance a queue
Fedora – 2 queues: API-M and API-A (CRUD – create, read, update, delete)
Why DAMS?
- digitisation
- Store “things” and metadata about them, independent of Fedora
- components, open interfaces, open standards
Scalability
- object storage, cluster / distributed system, live replicas
- MAD (idle disks)
- Honeycombe (self-healing system)
- search engines (indexing accessing)
Longevity
- simplicity interfaces
- reduce dependency of third-parties
- abstraction layers/resolvers
Availability
- enhance long-term availability
- disaster-recovery
- snapshot of VMs on the system
- digital preservation
- represent the entire collection
Interoperability
- implementation of interfaces
- avoid low-level interfaces (use standard interfaces)
Sustainability
- budget, archival, migrate skills
- from analogue to digital culture
DAMS Phase 2
Skills needed for the future and the current projects.
Honeycombe – write once read many. Make amends, difference and commit later.
Check also: Less talk, more code blog at oxfordrepo.blogspot.com