ADMIRAL: the final push

Our most recent development review is at http://imageweb.zoo.ox.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/20110331_Quick_Review.

Over the past few months of the ADMIRAL project, we've been transitioning from a substantially feature development oriented mode to stabilization and maintenance, in order to allow us to ramp up user engagement activities.  As part of this, the project management style has evolved to shorter, less elaborately planned sprints.  Summaries can be seen on the project plan page. These essentially consist of a combined review and planning session conducted at approximately 1-week intervals, driven by requirements recorded in the project issues list.

We intend to complete all items recorded as high and medium priority in the issues list, except where blocked by issues noted that we are unable to resolve with available resources.  This represents a kind of feature freeze in the ADMIRAL data store function, with enhancements focused on stabilization and manageability of the system.  With ADMIRAL user features stabilized, and a stable deployment of Databank, we will update all of the deployed systems, and encourage researchers to deposit real research data sets from ADMIRAL to Databank for preservation and publication.  Getting real research data deposited and published with DataCite DOIs represents the main project goal that we now want to see realized before the end.

Specifically, over the next three months, we aim to:

• Test and integrate the remaining Databank features (see issue list items tagged "Databank")
• Issue 9: displaying content tree of dataset prior to confirmation of submission
• Issue 42: a web interface for user administration
• Issue 45: basic Debian packaging for ADMIRAL (which we expect to allow us to deploy easily on more recent versions of Ubuntu)
• if and when time permits, picking up and progressing some of the lower priority technical debt issues

while also dealing with any other critical issues that may arise.

In parallel, we will engage with the various research groups to learn more about how and to what extent they are using ADMIRAL, and encourage them to start submitting datasets to the Databank service.