The wait is finally over! RAIDmap, the piece of software we have been developing in REDm-MED, is now available for early adoption from SourceForge. RAIDmap is an adaptation of the Compendium information mapping software, tailored for use as a data documentation tool. It uses the National Library of New Zealand’s Metadata Extractor to collect information about data records, provides tools for mapping out the associations between them, and can export this information in a handful of different formats.
Truth be told, RAIDmap has been up on SourceForge for a little while now, as we’ve been tidying it up for release and making sure everything works as advertised. Not perfectly, you understand, but as advertised: there are a few bugs still lurking in the system, and plenty of scope for improvement. We see the delivery of the tool as the beginning rather than an end to it, and on that note we would like to put out a special plea to any developers out there to have a look at the code and see if this a tool you might like to contribute to. If so, you’ll be interested in the fifth and final part of REDm-MED Deliverable 5, the RAIDmap Application Developer Guide. This explains how to get started compiling and developing RAIDmap, how the installers are generated, and gives an overview of which bits of the code do what. We think RAIDmap has the potential to be a useful data management tool, but it needs just a bit more TLC than we have time or funds to give it, so any help would be greatly appreciated.
With the delivery of the software and the Developer Guide, that pretty much brings us to the end of the REDm-MED project, but in the manner of an album bonus track, there’s one more report to reveal. (Don’t get too excited.) The Minimum Mandatory Metadata Set for RAIDmap specifies the metadata collected by the RAIDmap tool, and explains the reasons why those particular elements were chosen. For those in a hurry, the short version is that we took from PREMIS and the DataCite Metadata Schema those elements which were easiest to supply at the point of record creation (or thereabouts) rather than at the point of ingest into a repository. We hope the report and its approach may be of use to institutions who are also considering what metadata to collect about research datasets.
