IN012-05
Building Community and Road-Testing the New IGSN System Architecture

Tuesday, 8 December 2020: 20:46
Virtual
Douglas Fils, Consortium for Ocean Leadership, Washington, DC, United States, Jess C Robertson, New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, Wellington, New Zealand, Sarah Ramdeen, Columbia University, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Palisades, NY, United States and Jens F Klump, CSIRO Earth Science Resource Engineering, Perth, Australia
Recorded Presentation
Abstract:
The IGSN Global Sample Number is conducting a project (IGSN 2040) to modernise its business model and technical architecture to grow its sustainability and scalability. Part of the IGSN 2040 project is to move the IGSN system architecture to modern web architecture principles. A key element of the new architecture is the publication of metadata through community-governed metadata profiles and enabling the system to handle multiple metadata profiles alongside each other. This is increasingly important as IGSN expands from its traditional user base in the earth and environmental sciences into other disciplines like archaeology, material science and agriculture.

The change from the original protocol for disseminating and harvesting IGSN metadata based on XML schemas to web architectures based on JSON does not come without its own challenges and we wanted to find a way to guide the IGSN user community to the new architecture. The new architecture also introduces changes to the role of the IGSN Agent facilitating identifier registration and introduces the role of the Information Aggregator harvesting metadata for value-adding services like sample catalogues, search engines, etc.

In May and June 2020 we conducted a two-week coding sprint with the IGSN community to road-test the concepts proposed in the new IGSN system architecture. For this sprint we brought together technical and non-technical participants from different organisations across multiple time zones. We used GitHub not only as a code repository, but also for asynchronous communication between scrums. Three scrum meetings were organised to allow in-person discussion. Due to the time zone differences these meetings were at demanding times of day for some participants. However, the meetings proved to be great for community building and getting everyone on the same page.

Road-testing elements of the new system architecture through a coding sprint allowed us to get key stakeholders on board and gave us the opportunity to test new concepts with the community in a low-risk way. This presentation will report on the outcomes of the IGSN 2040 code sprint and the lessons learnt.

More detail on the outcomes of the code sprint can be found at http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3905364.

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