Introducing Djehuty, 4TU.ResearchData’s open source repository software

We are delight­ed to announce the launch of our in-house devel­oped free and open source repos­i­to­ry soft­ware, called Dje­huty. With this launch, 4TU.ResearchData is proud to move to a free and open-source soft­ware, in sup­port of our open sci­ence efforts and over­all vision.

Why Dje­huty?

Over the last years, 4TU.ResearchData has seen an active com­mu­ni­ty of researchers and sup­port staff around its data repos­i­to­ry. We are always lis­ten­ing to the feed­back and improve­ment sug­ges­tions from our com­mu­ni­ty and so, the time had come to fur­ther shape the tech­ni­cal devel­op­ment of 4TU.ResearchData and work towards sus­tain­able infra­struc­tures togeth­er. 

By join­ing our efforts and co-devel­op­ing solu­tions togeth­er, we are not only respond­ing to chang­ing com­mu­ni­ty needs but also sup­port­ing Open Sci­ence in gen­er­al. Tak­ing the strate­gic deci­sion to move to a free and open source soft­ware proved to be the best way for­ward. 

As we move on, we want to express our grat­i­tude to the func­tion­al­i­ties offered by our pre­vi­ous repos­i­to­ry — figshare — as well as all the sup­port received from their teams. 

We are now going into pro­duc­tion with Dje­huty, a name tak­en after an Egypt­ian god who invent­ed writ­ing. The code has been open source since June 30, 2022: https://github.com/4TUResearchData/djehuty  

What’s new?

Although the main func­tion­al­i­ties have not changed sub­stan­tial­ly, there are a few updates worth shar­ing with you: 

• A dash­board page is cre­at­ed for each reg­is­tered user. This is your per­son­al page where you can access your draft and pub­lished datasets/collections and add new ones. The dash­board page will be fur­ther expand­ed in the future, so please let us know if you want some­thing includ­ed.
• Con­nect­ing with Git: if you upload soft­ware files, and select Soft­ware deposit in the ‘Files’ sec­tion of the upload form, there is the option to do this direct­ly from your Git repo. This capa­bil­i­ty is open to any type of Git repo and is not lim­it­ed to GitHub or Git­Lab only. Please note that if you pre­vi­ous­ly applied the auto-sync set­ting that auto­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­ates a new ver­sion of your dataset in 4TU.ResearchData with a new release in your Git repo, this  will no longer work. Depend­ing on the needs of the com­mu­ni­ty, we will fur­ther inves­ti­gate how to opti­mise the Git inte­gra­tion.
• API: the API is back­ward com­pat­i­ble to ensure you can work the same way with this API as you did before with the figshare API. All you need to do is cre­ate a new API token.
• Data mod­el: Now that we have moved to open source repos­i­to­ry soft­ware not only means that the code­base is com­plete­ly open to let every­one know how our repos­i­to­ry works, but also that we have imple­ment­ed open stan­dards and an open data mod­el.  Our data mod­el is based on RDF (Resource Descrip­tion Frame­work), a seman­tic web stan­dard used to describe and mod­el infor­ma­tion for web resources. RDF rep­re­sents infor­ma­tion in graphs, mak­ing it eas­i­er to cap­ture and query data, and sup­ports us to cre­ate inter­op­er­a­ble data and sys­tems.

Mar­ta Teperek, Direc­tor of 4TU.ResearchData, says about the release: “I am extreme­ly proud to over­see the strate­gic invest­ment in free and open source soft­ware. This will enable our com­mu­ni­ty to shape our future devel­op­ments and dri­ve inno­va­tion in 4TU.ResearchData. This is an essen­tial step to put Open Sci­ence prin­ci­ples into prac­tice and facil­i­tate dig­i­tal sov­er­eign­ty.” 

We would like to thank every­one involved in the devel­op­ment of Dje­huty, from our tech­ni­cal team, to com­mu­ni­ty man­agers and mem­bers, the 4TU.ResearchData Board, col­leagues from part­ner insti­tu­tions, non-tech­ni­cal staff and many more… We could not have done it with­out this won­der­ful team effort!

More infor­ma­tion:

You can read our blog arti­cle (s) to find out more about Dje­huty: We are going free and open-source.