The Data Vault project is three months long, and is a collaboration between the universities of Edinburgh and Manchester.  Due to the short nature of the project, we have decided to hold monthly meetings.  The first of these was held in Manchester University Library in April.

We held the second project meeting on Tuesday 5th May in Edinburgh University Library.  One of the main focus points of the meeting was on storage and architecture.  We were therefore luck that experts in these areas attended from both universities.

The agenda for the meeting was:

• Overview and introductions for architecture/infrastructure attendees
• Review of the last month
• User cases and workflows
• Filesystem / transfer security (user credentials) – not in POC
• Dealing with large files / large archives (split bags?) configurable per backend
• Relationship with PURE (metadata harvesting) – not in POC
• Prototype planning
• Plans for the next month

Agreed actions from the meeting were:

• Define the requirements of the data vault to a level that can be implemented:
  • Define ‘broker’, ‘storage’, and ‘archive’ APIs;
    • Broker API ideas:
      https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dI4U6tJ9KoB_nCjl9P5JxcL878EsxMcXhEwjb1CJwos/edit?usp=sharing
  • Define database structure for metadata / search index;
  • Define security requirements (Shibboleth / CAS / CoSign)
  • Select technologies for web user interface and broker;
  • Setup test infrastructure for month 3;
  • Architecture diagrams;
  • Test cases for the APIs / test data sets;
  • User interface wireframes (associated with use cases);
• Consult in local institutions, and wider via project blog, to ensure the use cases are valid;