Open Access News

Savas Parastatidis, Microsoft and "Research-Output" Repositories, Savas:web, March 24, 2008.  This excerpt omits several paragraphs of text, three images, a code snippet, and a video of a prototype.  See the original for a fuller picture.

What is Microsoft going to show at the Open Repositories 2008 conference in few days? Why is the entire "scholarly communications" section of the Microsoft Research Technical Computing team going there? ...Lee Dirks, Alex Wade, Santosh Balasubramanian (an honorary member!), and I are going to be there to interact with the community and to showcase —for the first time externally— our "research-output" repository platform....

Our goal is to abstract the use of underlying technologies and provide an easy-to-use development model, based on .NET and LINQ, for building repositories on top of robust technologies.

The platform has a "semantic computing" flavor. The concepts of "resource" and "relationship" are first-class citizens in our platform API. We do offer a number of "research-output"-related entities for those who want to use them (e.g. "technical report", "thesis", "book", "software download", "data", etc.), all of which inherit from "resource". However, new entities can be introduced into the system (even programmatically) while the existing ones can be further extended through the addition of properties.

This means, obviously, that arbitrary relationships between resources can be established. Our platform comes with a number of "known" predicates (e.g. "added by", "authored by", "cites", etc.) but it is extensible to accommodate any new predicates developers want to introduce....

Our system will be the back-end of a future version of the Microsoft Research web site. After Milestone 1, we’ll focus on an immediate public release, which is going to be free for download by the community. In fact, we are seriously thinking of even releasing the code to CodePlex for the community to take and extend....

We are already well into the process of developing a collection of tools and interfaces on top of the platform as tangible examples of how to use it.  We already have implementations of OAI-PMH...and working on Search and a simple Web UI. We are also working on WPF and Silverlight tools for visualizing the relationships between the resources within our repository....

At the Open Repositories 2008 conference, we will formally unveil our work in advance of its official release and initiate interactions/exchanges with the DSpace, EPrints, Fedora, and other players in the repository community. This is crucial to us because —like every other project our group undertakes— we are intensely focused on interoperability.

I want to be very transparent here: our effort is intended to provide a repository option to those institutions/organizations that already license or have access to Microsoft software (including the free versions of the products, like SQL Server Express). Our platform is intended to sit on top of the existing Microsoft "stack". By providing this new research-output repository platform at no cost, we can offer added value for our existing (and future) customers in the academic and research space. It is critical to point out that we are making every effort to ensure our platform is optimized to make the best use of Microsoft technologies AND to also interoperate with all other existing systems and platforms in the repository ecosystem. We are actively seeking engagement and feedback from the community! ...

Update.  Tony Hey (Microsoft VP for External Research) writes to add, "My hope is that we can help create both EPrints and DSpace front ends so that librarians can choose which back end they prefer."