Common use of Risk Evaluation Clause in Contracts

Risk Evaluation. The CYCLADES project will develop the service component of an open virtual archive environment. Such component will be built on top of an archive component. The archive component is being developed by the US Open Archive initiative. Therefore, the two activities are complementary in that they address two different but interacting aspects of an open archives environment: the archive environment and the service environment. Obviously, there exists a dependency of the CYCLADES project on the achievements and results of the OAi. We want, here, to evaluate the risk which is inherent in this dependency relationship between the two activities and to identify effective recovery actions. The main risk concerns the fact that OAi lacks an institutional existence which could guarantee organizational stability and evolution of the OAi technical framework. OAi is managed by a Steering Committee (SC) and a Technical Committee (TC). To overcome this problem and make more tight the collaboration between CYCLADES and OAi we have agreed with one of the principal investigators of OAi, Cornell University (Dr. ▇▇▇▇ ▇▇▇▇▇▇), that a US proposal for funding had to be submitted to NSF (in response to the Cultural Heritage Applications Unit of the EC DG Information Society invitation for EU-US multi-partner, multi-national project proposals). The objectives of this twin proposal are to: Support the evolution and organisational stabilisation of the of the OAi Evaluate the effectiveness and cross-domain applicability of OAi conventions Due to a lack of synchronisation between the NSF and IST Calls this proposal has not yet been submitted. There is, thus, a risk which must be carefully evaluated: the case that the US proposal is not accepted for funding. Even in this worst case the CYCLADES project maintains its validity. Indeed, the OAi has already defined agreements (technical mechanisms and organisational structures) to support interoperability of e-print archives. These agreements are known as “The Santa Fe Convention of the Open Archives Initiative”. The Santa Fe Convention presents a technical and organisational framework designed to facilitate the discovery of content stored in distributed e-print archives. It makes easy-to- implement recommendations for archives that will allow data from e-print archives to become widely available via its inclusion in a variety of end-user services. In addition, the Santa Fe Convention introduces an organisational framework for making information available about archives that adhere to the technical recommendations of the Convention – data providers – and about trusted parties that build end-user services for data originating from such archives – the service providers. As such it provides a communication mechanism between providers of data and providers of services and creates a community of open archives. So far, eight large US and EU archives have decided to adhere to the OAi and have implemented the Santa Fe agreements. Therefore, an OAi testbed already exists. Thus, even in the worst case, i.e., that the US proposal is not accepted for funding, CYCLADES maintains its validity and can run on top of a credible OAi testbed.

Risk Evaluation. The CYCLADES project will develop the service component of an open virtual archive environment. Such component will be built on top of an archive component. The archive component is being developed by the US Open Archive initiative. Therefore, the two activities are complementary in that they address two different but interacting aspects of an open archives environment: the archive environment and the service environment. Obviously, there exists a dependency of the CYCLADES project on the achievements and results of the OAi. We want, here, to evaluate the risk which is inherent in this dependency relationship between the two activities and to identify effective recovery actions. The main risk concerns the fact that OAi lacks an institutional existence which could guarantee organizational stability and evolution of the OAi technical framework. OAi is managed by a Steering Committee (SC) and a Technical Committee (TC). To overcome this problem and In order to make more tight the collaboration between CYCLADES and OAi we have agreed with one of the principal investigators of OAi, Cornell University (Dr. Dr ▇▇▇▇ ▇▇▇▇▇▇), that a US proposal for funding had to be submitted to NSF (in response to the Cultural Heritage Applications Unit of the EC DG Information Society invitation for EU-US multi-partner, multi-national project proposals). The objectives of this twin proposal (see Annex 1) are to: Support the evolution and organisational stabilisation of the of the OAi Open Archives initiative (OAi). Evaluate the effectiveness and cross-domain applicability of OAi conventions conventions. Investigate and develop collection and service meta-data standards. Due to a lack of synchronisation synchronization between the NSF and IST Calls this proposal has not yet been submitted. There isTo face this lack of synchronization between the starting dates of the two projects the following recovery action is underway. Cornell University will submit a small “unsolicited” proposal to NSF as an extension of an ongoing DL project run by Cornell and funded by NSF. NSF has guaranteed that the evaluation and approval of this proposal will be done by October 2000. This means that Cornell could be able to collaborate with the CYCLADES project since its initial phases and thus guarantee coherence between the two projects. However, thus, a risk which must be carefully evaluated: even in the worst case that the US proposal is not accepted approved for funding. Even in this worst case the funding CYCLADES project maintains its validitycan be equally carried out efficiently. Indeed, since the service environment will run on top of the archive environment this latter must be operational in order to be able to conduct a meaningful experimentation of the proposed service environment. The OAi has already defined agreements (technical mechanisms and organisational organizational structures) to support interoperability of e-print archives. These agreements are known as “The Santa Fe Convention of the Open Archives Initiative”. The Santa Fe Convention presents a technical and organisational framework designed to facilitate the discovery of content stored in distributed e-print archives. It makes easy-to- implement recommendations for archives that will allow data from e-print archives to become widely available via its inclusion in a variety of end-user services. In addition, the Santa Fe Convention introduces an organisational framework for making information available about archives that adhere to the technical recommendations of the Convention – data providers – and about trusted parties that build end-user services for data originating from such archives – the service providers. As such it provides a communication mechanism between providers of data and providers of services and creates a community of open archives. So far, eight large US and EU archives (see Annex 2) have decided to adhere to the OAi and have implemented the Santa Fe agreements. Therefore, already exists an OAi testbed already existstestbed. ThusThe twin Cornell proposal intents to further develop this initiative. However, the service environment to be developed by the CYCLADES proposal could run on the existing testbed. Therefore, even in the worst case, i.e., that the US proposal is not accepted for funding, CYCLADES maintains its validity and can run on top of a credible OAi testbed. In addition, an agreement between CYCLADES and the OAi Steering Committee will be signed which will guarantee that all revisions of the technical and organizational specifications will be made available to the CYCLADES project. CYCLADES will report on aspects of the original specifications, identified during the experimentation phase, which require reconsideration. The OAi Steering Committee has expressed its interest to see more European Archives included in the OAi. As a result of this cooperation between CYCLADES and OAi, a workshop, to be organized by the OAi Technical Committee, has been agreed to be held in Europe September 2001 in conjunction with the ECDL conference.