RAMP Project Overview
Executive Summary
The Research Activityflow and Middleware Priorities (RAMP) project seeks to improve national research effectiveness by addressing two of the most challenging components of the DEST/JISC E-Framework for Education and Research and the DEST Accessibility Framework – the areas of people-oriented workflows for research processes, and open standards authorisation for protected repositories.
Background
While there has been major investment in research infrastructure such as bandwidth, high performance computing and data storage, there has been relatively little investment in systems to support “process-oriented” research requirements, such as:
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managing the research enterprise lifecycle (from grant planning to grant submission, to project initiation, to project lifecycle management, to research outcome dissemination),
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implementing auditable evaluation processes for assessing research quality (RQF assessor workflows, journal/conference peer review management, etc),
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designing and tracking article submission processes for Institutional Repositories,
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flexibly configuring and running online research collaboration processes (such as staged collaborative analysis and discussion for PhD/Postdocs around raw data, leading to interpretation, visualisation, and ultimately publications), and
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process-oriented research data collection from human subjects (such as in the humanities, and social and cognitive sciences).
The common element of the above examples is people-based workflow, or “activityflow” as it is described in the RAMP project. Activityflow is defined as workflow involving two or more human actors, often acting concurrently (not just sequentially) over multiple steps, potentially in multiple roles, co-ordinated by a software system that allows for authoring, running and tracking (including auditing) of activityflows. As many researchers collaborate across institutional boundaries, activityflows must be capable of running in distributed (trans-organisational) contexts.
The second challenging component of the E-Framework that RAMP addresses is open standards authorisation (using XACML – eXtensible Access Control Markup Language). There is an increasing need for flexible management of protected content as part of repositories such as Institutional Repositories, E-Reserves, etc, but most approaches to protected content rely on hardwired or proprietary authorisation mechanisms that are inefficient, costly, inflexible and promote system lock-in.
Objectives of the Project
The project is organized into 3 areas, namely (1) RAMS (Research Activity Management System), (2) Activityflow Research and (3) DRAMA (Digital Repository Access Middleware Architecture).
(1) RAMS (Research Activity Management System):
The RAMS focuses on capturing E-Research activityflows so that they can be analysed, shared, re-used and adapted. This will lead to a national website providing a library of “actionable” best practice activityflows for common research processes and the Research Activity Management System (RAMS) to run them. This approach draws on the success of capturing and sharing “Learning Designs” within e-learning, and applies it to the challenges of people-based workflow in E-Research.
(2) Activityflow Research:
The RAMS work will be complemented by theoretical analysis of workflow standards and languages as applied to E-Research.
(3) DRAMA (Digital Repository Access Middleware Architecture):
The DRAMA addresses the need for open standards authorisation through the creation of a generalised XACML authorisation module that could potentially be adopted by any repository system. This module will be implemented and tested initially using the Fedora repository, based on existing work on Fedora and XACML from MAMS and ARROW. Subsequent implementation with other repository systems will be explored.
The final stage of RAMP will unify the workflow and authorisation components through a “fusion” project to explore interaction and integration between these two areas, and their overall combined impact on the E-Framework. This fusion project will lay the groundwork for potential future work in unified workflow and authorisation services, and their interaction with other E-Framework services.