ARROW week

This week I'm in Brisbane for an ARROW week. On Tuesday there was the ARROW repositories day, which was live-blogged [1, 2, 3] by Chris Rusbridge. Chris and I met via the blogosphere talking about how many clicks it should take to put stuff in a repository. His presentation at the ARROW day was good vision of how the repository might disappear into the walls like plumbing. (It also turns out that we nearly ended up working for the same institution at one stage.)

I talked about OAI-ORE but spent a bit of time on the impact that other standards have had on the repository world so far. Maybe too much, as David Flanders tagged the post as “This post identifies some issues with XACML in the ARROW project (it also talk about ORE a little)”.

One mildly surprising thing I got from the first couple of ARROW days is that a number of people seem to think that repository is a dirty word now and they try to avoid using it – maybe we should use the French-language version dépôt, which brings to my mind the place where omnibuses go to sleep every night. (Renaud Michotte showed us the work they've been doing at the Université catholique de Louvain.)

Wednesday was the ARROW community day – which was a slightly uneasy mix of celebration and trepidation as ARROW central prepare to move on to new challenges while the ARROW repository rats (depot dingos?) wonder about how they'll go in a world where there's less support. In a HHGTTGesque gesture ARROW-central gave us all a towel. In addition to the towels, which should come in handy, there is going to be a new repository support service in Australia along the lines of the Repositories Support Service in the UK but we don't know what that will look like yet.

I showed off The Fascinator.

Today and tomorrow (Thursday and Friday) I'm at the second VALET code-fest/camp thing at QUT. The developers have just started work, so nothing to report yet but I'll report here.