The GRADE Project is now closed. This site will no longer be maintained, and may contain broken links.
Project Background
Project Description
Conventional scientific method has historically been data-driven and with current technologies the wealth of created data assets has grown dramatically. Despite this importance, however, sharing data is not easy and many researchers have discussed the problems, including:
- the willingness to share,
- locating data,
- mechanisms for sharing and accessing data.
Given these problems, the scoping of a Geospatial Repository for Academic Deposit and Extraction (GRADE) seems both necessary and timely.
Brief Outline of Work
A holistic approach to understanding the issues around storing and accessing geospatial data within a geospatial digital repository will be adopted. The development of demonstrators will be used to explore the range of technical and cultural issues involved and to gather evidence via the assembly of a portfolio of use cases. The project will address a range of issues which are of generic concern to repositories (irrespective of content type), by using a geospatial media repository as an exemplar. The broad areas for investigation will include investigating:
- Digital Rights and IPR issues related to use and reuse of primary and derived data.
- the technical and cultural milieu in which a geospatial repository might operate in order to better understand the costs and benefits of various approaches.
- the technical and cultural issues around informal data sharing mechanisms.
Additionally, the project will endeavour to:
- establish and evaluate prototype demonstrator repositories based on both formal and informal models.
- establish the mutuality between media-centric (geospatial) repositories and Institutional repositories.
- establish how metadata standards deployed in various repositories may meet the requirements of the geospatial community (that is the HFE/GoGeo profile of ISO19115) and what the minimum quality thresholds for useable spatial metadata (use case driven) may be.
Addressing JISC Digital Repository Programme Objectives
GRADE will explicitly address a number of JISC Digital Repository Programme priority issues via:
- establishing detailed use cases and user based evidence for the requirements and functionality of a repository capable of managing geospatial assets;
- scoping alternative approaches to establishing a geospatial repository;
- comparing and contrasting an explicitly geospatial repository against an Institutional repository;
- unravelling the complexity of digital rights issues inherent in reuse and derivation through compilation of a case studies portfolio;
- shedding light on the variety of (potential and realised) metadata standards, data formats and data quality indicators that are currently in use.
