Blog

CKAN for Research Data Management workshop

  • Joss Winn
  • 27 Feb 2013
[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="338"] The 'researcher' user group[/caption] On 18 February, over 40 people participated in a workshop in London which focused on the use of CKAN for 'research data management'. The event was led by the Orbital project at the University of Lincoln. After some initial presentations, participants broke into groups to gather a list of requirements for CKAN - or any data management system - in a research setting. You can read all about the day, and what we produced, over on the Orbital project blog. There are also write-ups from the DCC, Datapool, data.bris and LSE. We hope that the workshop marked the beginning of a CKAN user and developer community within the higher education and research sectors. If you're interested in joining us, feel free to add yourself to the new CKAN4RDM mailing list. The results of the workshop will also form part of the research for a paper I am presenting at the IASSIST conference in May. The abstract is as follows:
This paper offers a full and critical evaluation of the open source CKAN software <http://> for use as a Research Data Management (RDM) tool within a university environment. It presents a case study of CKAN’s implementation and use at the University of Lincoln, UK, and highlights its strengths and current weaknesses as an institutional Research Data Management tool. The author draws on his prior experience of implementing a mixed media Digital Asset Management system (DAM), Institutional Repository (IR) and institutional Web Content Management System (CMS), to offer an outline proposal for how CKAN can be used effectively for data analysis, storage and publishing in academia. This will be of interest to researchers, data librarians, and developers, who are responsible for the implementation of institutional RDM infrastructure. This paper is presented as part of the dissemination activities of the JISC-funded Orbital project <http://orbital.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk>.
I hope to see some of you there.