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BagIt Research Data (BIRD) repository

This is a demonstration project inspired by the BagIt standard for storage and network transfer of arbitrary digital content, including research data.

With research datasets represented as "Bags" with metadata in the bag-info.txt file, and the pointers to the actual data files on a download server listed in the fetch.txt file, writing a repository server becomes relatively simple. This project is an exploration into such a research data repository server.

At this moment it only includes a few examples with the BagIt metadata format; most of the examples here use various metadata schemas from other repositories. In the future I can imagine that tools could be implemented to convert the repository specific metadata (and manifest file list) to the BagIt specification.

Existing datasets and repositories

The project demonstrates a research data repository by reusing some public datasets from the following research data repositories:

Metadata

The web server implemented in this project hosts the metadata of the datasets (or "research data collections"). It consists of an overview page that lists all datasets, and an individual landing page for each dataset.

If this were a proper repository publishing the original datasets, then the DOI of the datasets shoudl directo to the corresponding landing page here.

Data

Besides the metadata, the landing page contains (or should contain) links to the actual data files to download. The files themselves are not hosted on the same web server but could be on a FTP server, a WEBDAV server, an S3 server, etc.

Dataset creation

At this moment there is no mechanism implemented nor procedure documented regarding the construction of datasets. Also the minting of DOIs is not part of the current efforts. It is assumed that a file with metadata is provided in JSON, YAML, TSV, CSV, or XML format, and that the actual files have been made available on a download server.

Deploying this website

This project is implemented using Jekyll, a static website generator. To run it on your own computer, you should install Ruby and Gem, and run

gem install bundler jekyll

git clone https://github.com/robertoostenveld/bird.git
cd bird
bundle install

Subsequently, you can convert the markdown into html documents with

bundle exec jekyll serve --livereload  --incremental

Since I am also running this site on Github pages, you may need to edit the baseurl field in the _config.yml file. For a local deployment it should be empty (""), for deployment on Github it should correspond to the repository name ("bird") .