DOI Processing For ICAT

Documentation overview

This Documentation will hold details of the decisions made, both technical and requirements based, as the project progresses. Requirements are pretty loose at this stage and have arisen mostly through discussion.

Project Overview

Why

• Diamond wants to make some of the data, created by its instruments and visiting scientists, open to the public.

When

• the creation of Data publications for the backlog of datasets which should have already been published (based on Investigations' releaseDate for example).

• when a user wants to create a DOI and Data publications based on a set of icat entities

What

• An API has been created to allow:

  • the minting of DOI/DataPublications based on an investigation

  • a user to create a ‘user-defined’ DOI/DataPublications for some ICAT entities, based on metadata provided by them.

Code

The code for the API lives here

Useful Information

• The ICAT 5 Snapshot schema. In order to hold information relating to the opening up of datasets to the public, a new DataPublication table has been created.

• The Datacite schema. In order to publicly release any information the DDS holds, a DOI will be created to store the metadata for that collection of data. Datacite provides an online space to store that metadata and the associated persistent identifiers (PID). This PID will be inserted into the new DataPublication table.

  • The Datacite Restfull API. Used to programmatically create and amend DOIs.

• The Datacite Test repository. Used as a test space to create DOIs (contact for user/pass details).

• Python-icat. A python client to assist with talking to ICAT programmatically.