Download PDF of the full Annual Review - Edina

More documents

Recommendations

Info

EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009Gain understanding by undertaking research into innovative services andenhancementsEDINA exists to add value to the work of our communities by developing and delivering common services atthe ‘network-level’. Determining what adds value and how we can arrive at the position to deliver takesinvestment in understanding. By undertaking innovative R&D work, EDINA seeks to gain that understandingand play our part in shaping the future 9 .Personalisation projectsDuring 2008-2009, EDINA has been investigating how services can be presented and personalised to addresschanging information seeking and user practices. A seven-month project funded by JISC commenced inFebruary 2009, which has been exploring mechanisms to support personalisation across the JISC IE. It followson from the Developing Personalisation for the Information Environment (DPIE) programme of work, wherethe final reports from the DPIE1 and DPIE2 projects highlighted tagging and personalised search andrecommendation engines as areas for further work. Two ‘rapid’ demonstrators were designed and built atEDINA to demonstrate:• Location-based searching for JISC IE services: by taking location information on resources (and services) andusing these to sort and rank the results of searches on the basis of geographic proximity to a user-definedlocation.• Management and use of service-content references via a shared middleware service: by investigating use of a referencelinking knowledge base, with a focus on multimedia resources, that could act as middleware forpersonalisation actions by services into the JISC IE.EDINA has been developing a middleware location service for third-party services to use to query and set users’location preferences. Other service providers can exploit these preferences in order to personalise their services.The work undertaken for the project was guided by the requirements of a simple use case, namely that a user isinterested in locating libraries that are close to their current location and that hold a copy of a journal article theyhave found using a resource discovery tool. For the purposes of the project a demonstrator was written that usesthe Scholarly Communications website to identify journal articles and then uses the geolocation middleware, toreturn a result set geographically sorted based on their proximity to the user.Geospatial projectsIn 2008-2009, EDINA began to play its part in the EU-funded European Spatial Data Infrastructure Network(ESDIN) project, helping to develop a best practice network and to evaluate the theory of integrating nationalSDIs. EDINA is involved in several work packages relating to technical architecture, including metadata, dataquality control, data schemas transformation and interoperability services. EDINA is contributing experiencegained during the EuroGlobalMap (EGM) pilot and its wider experience of providing geographic informationinto the tertiary academic sector, as well as bringing European academic users to the ESDIN. ESDIN is underthe leadership of EuroGeographic, which represents 52 national mapping and cadastral agencies from 43countries across Europe.EuroGeoNames (EGN), a European e-Contentplus-funded 30-month project, ended in February 2009. TheEuropean Commission considered it a great success. The project team developed a federated gazetteerinfrastructure, local services and middleware service architecture for pan-European access to official geographicalnames data. EDINA assumed responsibility for developing the gazetteer data model and the application schema.The project consortium brought together partners from the public, academic and private sectors, embracing thefull ‘value chain’, from data providers to technology partners to value added service retailers. EuroGeographic isnow taking the project forward as a European-wide service.9 Further information about EDINA projects may be found at: http://edina.ac.uk/projects/10
EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009The GeoDigRef project investigated the utility of enhancing existing digitised resources through better indexingof resources. Specifically, it looked at how geographic referencing of resources via automatic tools (the‘GeoParser’) might be useful in developing improved geographical search capacities across collections. Usingthree distinct resource collections, and by building two distinct search and browse interfaces, the project showedhow a new dimension to search – the ‘where’ aspect of resources – can be better exploited and may be added toexisting collections with relative ease and at little cost. This project provided an exemplar for the broader aim ofgeo-enablement across the JISC Information Environment, the ultimate aim being to ensure that discovery viageography (the ‘where’ component of resources which is a cross-cutting constant across the majority ofcollections e.g. country, place name, postcode, parish name etc) becomes more widely embedded into searchparadigms within the JISC IE. The project ran for six months from November 2008.The Geospatial Application Profile (GAP) project commenced in April 2008. Within the Discovery to Deliveryarea of the JISC Repositories and Preservation Programme, the need for domain specific specialist metadataprofiles for purposes of search and discovery across institutional repositories was identified. Subsequently workfunded by JISC commissioned a series of Application Profiles of which the Geospatial Application Profile(GAP) was one (others being the Scholarly Works Profile, Image Profile and Time Based Media Profile). Usingexisting community-adopted open metadata standards, GAP leveraged well-established international standards indescribing geospatial resources within a Dublin Core Application Profile. Uptake and embedding work iscontinuing; however, wider uptake has stalled while JISC makes a decision on whether spatial should be includedwithin other Application Profiles.The Coastal Marine Perception Application for Scientific Scholarship (COMPASS) project was funded by JISCunder its Knowledge Organisation and Semantic Services Programme. Led by EDINA, the project broughttogether a consortium consisting of experts from the Semantic Interoperability Laboratory at MeunsterUnversity (Germany), the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at National University Ireland, Galway andAllworlds Geothinking. The project ran from December 2007 to June 2009. COMPASS successfullydemonstrated how an ontologically supported knowledge infrastructure for the coastal marine environmentcould assist in the enhanced discovery, access and use of scientific resources such as data, journal articles,scientific models and web services. To build the knowledge infrastructure, COMPASS combined technologiesand open standards in the areas of metadata, registries, ontologies and digital libraries with a focus on thegeospatial domain.Access Management projectsDuring 2008/2009, the Access Management Expert Group was active in its collaboration with Internet2 (I2),attending I2 meetings and contributing to and advancing Shibboleth technology. The following software wasdeveloped by members of the expert group and released into the international Shibboleth community:• Version 2 Windows-based Quick IdP Installer. Like version 1, version 2 of the IdP installer provides amechanism to enable inexperienced users to get started quickly but includes more options at installationtime – so requiring less manual manipulation of configuration files. Version 2 supports the SAML 2protocol.• Discovery Service (next generation WAYF). The Discovery Service is designed to allow the exploitationof the more sophisticated features within the SAML 2 protocol to support discovery. It also includesmore intelligent searching for the user to select an IdP – a necessary requirement as federations get larger.Supporting the SAML 2 protocol provides the foundation to allow an SP to embed a WAYF interfacewithin their login page to effectively hide the existence of a separate Discovery Server from their users –an idea originally devised by SWITCH.The Expert group also worked with a small subgroup of Internet2 to develop a technical architecture to supporta practical method of inter-federation working. The work involved the development of an Aggregation Engine toallow the swapping of authorised metadata between federations with the intention that a prototype AggregationEngine will be developed early in 2010.11
Page 1 and 2: Front cover goes here.
Page 3 and 4: EDINA Annual Review 2008/20091. Dir
Page 5: EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009develo
Page 8 and 9: EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009At the
Page 10 and 11: EDINA Annual Review 2008/20093. Mee
Page 14 and 15: EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009The wo
Page 16 and 17: EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009Multim
Page 18 and 19: EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009to res
Page 20 and 21: EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009Schola
Page 22 and 23: EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009associ
Page 24 and 25: EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009and th
Page 26 and 27: EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009produc
Page 28 and 29: EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009b. Man
Page 30 and 31: EDINA Annual Review 2008/20095. For
Page 32: EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009Rear c

Download PDF of the full Annual Review - Edina

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?