Of all the products we build at Haplo, our Repository is by far the most community-driven. A perfect example of this collaborative effort was the hackday I attended yesterday to develop a prototype community ORCID dashboard.
It's great to have such an active community of repository managers, librarians, developers, and organisations working collaboratively to create a better environment for research publications - and even better when we get to meet in person and work on developing new services together.
Yesterday I attended a hackday to develop a prototype community ORCID dashboard. The initiative is being coordinated by JISC and basically the aim of the hackday was to put something together that would start to collate data from a variety of sources about people at a university, and then report if any of those sources had and ORCID iD for that author.
About ORCID
If you're unfamiliar with developments in repositories and research publishing, the ORCID iD is a seemingly simple but highly needed initiative to create a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes each researcher from ever other researcher - ensuring that every publication, research output, and research grant for a Prof John Smith is easily identified and linked to the right Prof John Smith.
What happened at the hackday
A group of repository managers and developers from different organisations met in London for the hackday to develop requirements and specifications into implementation goals followed by working on an implementation sprint. Some of the things we worked on during the day were:
* How to match people effectively from different data sources (we've been working on this at Haplo over the last few months so it was great to get hear how others are approaching this)
* Formats for data returned from requests to systems
* What kinds of storage and infrastructure would be required to support the service
Some of the things we'd like to work on next with the community include:
* Use a properly specified schema (probably the ORCID one) for data returned from repositories, CRIS etc.
* Add an administrative user interface
Haplo ORCID API
During the day I built a basic API for a Haplo repository to return data which is now available for anyone to try out. The source code for that Haplo plugin is openly available on GitHub. If you're interested in taking a look, please get in touch.
What's happening next
There's a follow-up event in Manchester in March which will provide training on the ORCID API and continue development of the UK Community Orcid Dashboard (COrDa). Notes on the ongoing development of the CoRDa project are available via GitHub, if you'd like to follow our progress.
Thanks to JISC and Adam Vials Moore (UK ORCID senior community engagement and technical manager) for organising a fun and useful day.
