Alexander James Ball

• LIbrary and Information Science
• Librarian at University of Bath

A Minimum Mandatory Metadata Set (M3S) was devised for the KIM (Knowledge and Information Management Through Life) Project to address two challenges. The first was to ensure the project’s documents were sufficiently self-documented to allow them to be preserved in the long term. The second was to trial the M3S and supporting templates and tools as...

The GW4 Research Data Services Group has developed a Research Data Management Triage Tool to help researchers find answers quickly to the more common research data queries, and direct them to appropriate guidance and sources of advice for more complex queries. The tool takes the form of an interactive web page that asks users questions and updates...

A Minimum Mandatory Metadata Set (M3S) was devised for the KIM (Knowledge and Information Management Through Life) Project to address two challenges. The first was to ensure the project's documents were sufficiently self-documented to allow them to be preserved in the long term. The second was to trial the M3S and supporting templates and tools as...

The Research Data Alliance (RDA) Metadata Standards Directory Working Group (MSDWG) is building a directory of descriptive, discipline-specific metadata standards. The purpose of the directory is to promote the discovery, access and use of such standards, thereby improving the state of research data interoperability and reducing duplicative standar...

The UK Research Data (Metadata) Registry (UKRDR) pilot project is implementing a prototype registry for the UK’s research data assets, enabling the holdings of subject-based data centres and institutional data repositories alike to be searched from a single location. The purpose of the prototype is to prove the concept of the registry, and uncover...

Information technologies hold great promise in achieving reduction in through-life support costs for long-lived complex artefacts such as aircraft and ships, and may allow very much improved assessment of asset condition, but in order for these to be achieved a number of technical and socio-technical challenges have to be overcome. Based on a persp...

Researchers across a range of fields have been inspired by the possibilities of data-intensive research. In many cases, however, researchers find themselves unable to take part due to a lack of facilities, insufficient access to data, cultural disincentives, and a range of other impediments. In order to develop a deeper understanding of this, UKOLN...

As academia in general, and research funders in particular, place ever greater importance on data as an output of research, so the value of good research data management practices becomes ever more apparent. In response to this, the Innovative Design and Manufacturing Research Centre (IdMRC) at the University of Bath, UK, with funding from the JISC...

The tremendous growth in digital data has led to an increase in metadata initiatives for different types of scientific data, as evident in Ball's survey (2009). Although individual communities have specific needs, there are shared goals that need to be recognized if systems are to effectively support data sharing within and across all domains. This...

In an increasingly competitive and global market, small enterprises can benefit just as much from Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) as larger enterprises. However, the software currently available to support PLM is aimed at larger enterprises and does not entirely suit the more flexible business processes and heterogeneous systems environment of s...

The digital curation of research data is best understood in the context of the data lifecycle, and specifically in the context of data repositories. Disciplinary data centres have established requirements for deposited data, and these requirements are increasingly reflected in requirements and guidance issued by research funding bodies. The digital...

Companies operating in today's global economy are increasingly expected to manage the entire lifecycle of their products, and are finding advantage in a distributed, collaborative working style. However, existing three-dimensional computer-aided design (CAD) systems are not well adapted to this way of working. This paper highlights some limitations...

Summary The Web runs at risk. Our generation has witnessed a revolution in human communications on a trajectory similar to that of the origins of the written word and language itself. Early Web pages have an historical importance comparable with prehistoric cave paintings or proto-historic pressed clay ciphers. They are just as fragile. The ease of...

Today, more and more companies are shifting from design and manufacturing to provide through-life support. Product models, as one of the most important types of product information, must be communicated, shared, and retrieved between distributed design teams and various users or partners at different stages of a product lifecycle. However, the conv...

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) has become increasingly important in the engineering community over the last decade or so, due to the globalisation of markets and the rising popularity of products provided as services. It demands the efficient capture, representation, organisation, retrieval and reuse of product data over its entire life. Simult...

The second Digital Curation Curriculum Symposium was held on April 1-3, 2009, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with the theme "Digital Curation Practice, Promise and Prospects". The Symposium featured sessions dealing with issues from the cutting edge of digital curation research, while others showcased recent developments in digital curation tools....

The Data Audit Framework provides organisations with the means to identify, locate and assess the current management of their research data assets. Armed with this information they are in a position to improve ongoing data management. In this article we share our experiences of implementing the Framework and report back on the kind of data issues r...

The Fifth International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects was held at the British Library on September 29–30, 2008, with the theme “Joined Up and Working: Tools and Methods for Digital Preservation”. Topics ranged from the technical foundations of digital preservation through preservation system architectures to the organizational and p...

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) has become increasingly important in the engineering community over the last decade or so, due to the globalisation of markets and the rising popularity of products provided as services. It demands the efficient capture, representation, organisation, retrieval and reuse of product data over its entire life. Simult...

For many decades, computer-aided design (CAD) packages have played an important part in the design of product models within the engineering domain. Within the last ten years, however, the increasing complexity of CAD models and their tighter integration into the workflow of engineering enterprises has led to their becoming the definitive expression...

The OAIS concept of Representation Information (RI) is a potential strategy for the curation and preservation of all types of information. We share insights gained from our exploration of issues concerned with the capture of crystallography and engineering RI as well as its structuring, collection and curation. In addition, we discuss the supportin...

Long-term users of engineering product data are hampered by the ephemeral nature of CAD file formats and the applications that work with them. STEP, the Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data (ISO 10303), promises to help with meeting this challenge, but is not without problems of its own. We present a complementary solution based on the u...

During the last decade the management of a product's data over its entire life has been gaining prominence. This is largely due to two factors: firstly, an increasingly collaborative environment in which product development and maintenance takes place in a geographically distributed and networked environment. Secondly, there is an emerging economic...

This is a report from the conference PV 2007, held at the German Remote Sensing Data Centre, DLR, Oberpfaffenhofen, on October 9–11, 2007. The PV conference is held every two years, and is concerned with the preservation of scientific and technical data, and the activity of adding value to the data to ensure it can be widely used and re-used. The t...

The designs for engineered products are increasingly defined not by technical drawings but by three-dimensional Computer Aided Design (CAD) models. With rapid turnover of computer hardware and CAD software, these models are in danger of becoming unreadable long before their usefulness has ended. One possible approach is to migrate the models into l...

Alexander Ball and Manjula Patel provide an overview of the second annual conference of the Digital Curation Centre.

Immortal information and through-life knowledge management: strategies and tools for the emerging product-service business paradigm', is a Grand Challenge project involving eleven different UK universities and incorporating substantial industry collaboration. It is investigating a range of issues associated with the move towards a product-service p...