"The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. Some 200 institutions representing higher education, publishing, network and telecommunications, information technology, and libraries and library organizations make up CNI's Members"

What Jangle (Just another generic library environment) is an experiment with middleware for library applications. If you build, use, manage or just want simple access to a library system, Jangle could be for you. Why The aim of the Jangle project is to provide a free, easy to use framework for building web services for LMSs/ILSs by exposing resources through the Atom Publishing Protocol. The goal of Jangle is to develop conventions intercommunication between the backend library services, such as ILSes and other applications and the AtomPub server (known as the Jangle "core"). By leveraging AtomPub, it eliminates the need to develop an entirely new API and allows developers to use existing client library and knowledge to easily integrate library data into new places.

Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

HUBzero allows you to create dynamic web sites that connect a community in scientific research and educational activities. HUBzero sites combine powerful Web 2.0 concepts with a middleware that provides instant access to interactive simulation tools. These tools are not just Java applets, but real research codes that can access TeraGrid, the Open Science Grid, and other national Grid computing resources for extra cycles. HUBzero was created by researchers at Purdue University in conjunction with the NSF-sponsored Network for Computational Nanotechnology. The technology was originally developed to support nanoHUB.org, a national resource for nanotechnology simulation. It has since been extended to create science gateways for other scientific domains.

The Rappture toolkit provides the basic infrastructure for a large class of scientific applications, letting scientists focus on their core algorithm when developing new simulators. Here's a demo of a Rappture interface for a Matlab script which simulates conduction through a molecule. This interface was generated automatically by Rappture, based on a description of the tool inputs and outputs. Rappture also makes it easy to put a friendly, interactive interface on existing legacy applications, without having to rewrite the code. For example, the SPICE circuit simulator has been around since 1972. You can now run SPICE on the nanoHUB via a simple Rappture interface. This shows the power of taking a powerful, batch-processing tool, and making it more interactive and accessible.

The objectives of the MEDICUS project are to promote transparent and non-proprietary solutions for medical image processing, and medical image and data sharing between heath care providers, physicians, and researchers in the life sciences. The Globus Toolkit provides the necessary architecture platform and standards to engage in this diverse and difficult field. As such it provides a vendor independent solution to efficiently communicate medical images and image outcome at various levels in the healthcare enterprise. This project will hopefully excel imaging research and health care by delivering a Globus Toolkit compliant extension to efficiently communicate medical image, diagnosis, and related data between health care providers in Grid environments.

Beyond Being There: A Blueprint for Advancing the Design, Development, and Evaluation of Virtual Organizations [PDF 3.3 MB]

Goals

* Conduct an analysis of previous and current models for sustainable digital preservation, and identify current best practices among existing collections, repositories and analogous enterprises.

* Develop a set of economically viable recommendations to catalyze the development of reliable strategies for the preservation of digital information.

* Provide a research agenda to organize and motivate future work in the specific area of economic sustainability of digital information.

The Data Audit Framework (DAF) provides organisations with the means to identify, locate, describe and assess how they are managing their research data assets. DAF combines a set of methods with an online tool to enable data auditors to gather this information. DAF will help ensure that research data produced in UK Higher Education Institutions is preserved and remains accessible in the long term.

The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE) are delighted to announce the release of the Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment (DRAMBORA) toolkit. This toolkit is intended to facilitate internal audit by providing repository administrators with a means to assess their capabilities, identify their weaknesses, and recognise their strengths. Digital repositories are still in their infancy and this model is designed to be responsive to the rapidly developing landscape. The development of the toolkit follows a concentrated period of repository pilot audits undertaken by the DCC, conducted at a diverse range of organisations including national libraries, scientific data centres and cultural and heritage data archives.

SKOS is an area of work developing specifications and standards to support the use of knowledge organization systems (KOS) such as thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading systems and taxonomies within the framework of the Semantic Web. SKOS & RDF SKOS provides a standard way to represent knowledge organization systems using the Resource Description Framework (RDF). Encoding this information in RDF allows it to be passed between computer applications in an interoperable way. Using RDF also allows knowledge organization systems to be used in distributed, decentralised metadata applications. Decentralised metadata is becoming a typical scenario, where service providers want to add value to metadata harvested from multiple sources.

A clearinghouse for ideas, news, and resources in support of citizen science-- partnerships between volunteers and scientists that answer real-world questions. managed by cornell

Scientists in a variety of disciplines (e.g., biology, ecology, astronomy) need access to scientific data and flexible means for executing complex analyses on those data. Such analyses can be captured as 'scientific workflows' in which the flow of data from one analytical step to another is captured in a formal workflow language. The Kepler project's overall goal is to produce an open-source scientific workflow system that allows scientists to design scientific workflows and execute them efficiently using emerging Grid-based approaches to distributed computation. Kepler is based on the Ptolemy II system for heterogeneous, concurrent modeling and design. Ptolemy II was developed by the members of the Ptolemy project at UC Berkeley. Although not originally intended for scientific workflows, it provides a mature platform for building and executing workflows, and supports multiple models of computation.

Metacat is a flexible metadata database. It utilizes XML as a common syntax for representing the large number of metadata content standards that are relevant to ecology. Thus, Metacat is a generic XML database that allows storage, query, and retrieval of arbitrary XML documents without prior knowledge of the XML schema.

The Metacat database models XML documents as a DOM tree, basically decomposing the nodes of the XML document and storing the node data as a series of records in a relational database via a JDBC connection. At this point, only Oracle and PostgreSQL have been tested as a backend databases, but we have avoided RDBMS specific features in order to maintain portability to other relational databases.

Metacat is implemented as a Java Servlet, and so communicates using basic HTTP protocol semantics. The figure below shows the basic structure of the Metacat architecture. A well defined interface for inserting, updating, deleting, querying, and transforming (using XSL) XML documents is presented. We would like to add the DOM API as an alternative supported mechanism for interacting with Metacat, but have not yet implemented this functionality.