Data Vault project kickoff meeting

Last week, members of the Data Vault project got together for the kickoff meeting.  Hosted at the University of Manchester Library, we were able to discuss the project plan, milestones for the three month project, agreed terminology for parts of the system, and started to assign tasks to project members for the first month.

Being only three months long, the project is being run in three one-month chunks. These are defined as follows:

  1. Month 1: Define and Investigate: This phase will allow us to agree what the Data Vault should do, and how it does it,  Specifically it will look at:
    1. What are the use cases for the Data Vault
    2. How do we describe the system (create overview diagrams)
    3. How should the data be packed (metadata + data) for long term archival storage
    4. Develop example workflows for how the Data Vault could be used in the research process
    5. Examine the capabilities of archival storage systems to ensure they can support the proposed Data Vault
  2. Month 2: Requirements and Design: This phase will create the requirements specification and initial design of the system:
    1. Define the requirements specification
    2. Use the requirement specification to design the Data Vault system
  3. Month 3: Develop a Proof of Concept: This phase will seek to develop a minimal proof of concept that demonstrates the concept of the Data Vault:
    1. Deliver a working proof of concept that can describe and archive some data, and then retrieve it

At the end of month three, we will prepare for the second Jisc Data Spring sandpit workshop where we will seek to extend the project to take the prototype and develop it into a full system.

All of this is being documented in the project plan, which is a ‘living document’ that is constantly evolving as the project progresses.  The plan is online as a Google Document:

Look out for further blog posts during the month as we undertake the definitions and investigations!

Kickoff meeting