Data Administrators

The NII Research Data Cloud provides platforms needed for academic institutions in our current era. Specifically, it provides a file management system in a secure environment, a repository platform for publishing data, and a discovery platform that makes academic resources more findable. By adopting this infrastructure, data administrators at academic institutions are freed from providing and maintaining such platforms themselves, and can concentrate on their core mission, which is to better serve the researchers in their institutions.
The infrastructure is customized to each institution by linking the system to GakuNin, the Shibboleth single sign-on service, and also by using the storage provided by each institution. NII and ICT centers at each institution will cooperate closely to meet these system requirements.

Published research outputs in WEKO3 are disseminated in human-readable formats on the Web and in a machine-readable format. For example, WEKO3 supports metadata provision protocol by OAI-PMH and ResourceSync. WEKO3 also supports sitemap and Google Scholar meta tag, and Open Graph Protocol for social services.

WEKO3 has a function to automatically publish research outputs on a specific date (embargo function). For example, WEKO3 allows setting the publication settings such as making the registered research outputs accessible only within a particular institution and, after one year, making it available to the public.

WEKO3 manages and publishes the research outputs of academic institutions in units of items. The item type represents the metadata of the item and can be flexibly customized by the user institution. By mapping the customized item type to a specific XML schema, metadata output using the XML schema is possible.

In order to promote the reuse of research data, it is not enough to publish research data. It is necessary to assign appropriate metadata and improve the data's appearance to make it easier for users to use. This kind of curation requires not only knowledge of the specialized field of research data but also knowledge and skills in research data management methodologies. In Japan, university librarians, URAs (University Research Administrators), and database administrators are expected to do this.

In the "Design and Practice of Research Data Management Services" course, you will learn what you need to know to support research data management. Research data has a lifecycle: how it is generated, stored, and finally reused. In this course, you will learn about service design, pre-research support, in-research support, post-research support, and day-to-day support in a way that follows the research data lifecycle.

GakuNin LMS allows the person in charge of the institution to view students' enrollment status at each institution based on their login information linked to GakuNin Federation. This supports systematic course management by the person in charge of the institution and provides primary data for efficient provision and evaluation of course materials according to the students' attributes.

To meet the demands for data curation that cannot be covered by a single institution, the data curation system will provide a human network infrastructure of data curators in various fields belonging to inter-university research institutions and research organizations and support staff at university libraries and other institutions. University libraries will be able to aggregate curation needs from researchers at their institutions and request data curators from other institutions to curate research data in various fields.