The eSciDoc Project

A New Infrastructure for Scientific Communication and Collaboration

The first phase of the project served to put the project in concrete terms with regard to four different services which will be realized in the course of the eSciDoc project and to reflect central aspects of the research process with respect to the communication, production and distribution of research results as well as to build upon such results. The following chart illustrates these services as well as the benefits associated with them for the scientist or institution using them.

The speciality of the eSciDoc project is the fact that it establishes a joint platform for all four services with integrated content, thereby offering an innovative, extensible and flexibly adaptable overall solution. This solution will be used within the MPS as a service operated at FIZ Karlsruhe, and it can also be run locally in the institutes and further refined as regards the open source concept. This applies both to the underlying infrastructure and to the services described here and their supporting applications.

Fedora was chosen because the set-up of eSciDoc requires the system to represent a central component in the context of eScience. Interoperability is a must, and is reflected in the architecture in the form of numerous APIs, import and export interfaces and the comprehensive use of standards. Fedora's object storage layer is a central and critical component of the eSciDoc framework.

The digital objects set up and stored in the system represent the valuable results of scientific work which are often only available in eSciDoc. This leads to a further fundamental requirement of the system: the long-term archiving of the digital objects and the provision of suitable interfaces with systems or projects dealing with digital preservation.