UK Discovery

EDINA is contributing to the JISC/RLUK Discovery programme being managed by Mimas, our sister datacentre. Discovery is designed to open up the databases behind existing websites through the creation and enhancement of metadata in order to assist developers and to foster the development of new services. This includes aggregations of what can appear fragmented across the Internet. Our work builds on our commitment to standards-based interoperability for machine-to-machine access, including technologies that support the semantic web through open linked data, in a variety of projects:

Will’s World: Walking through Shakespeare

William Shakespeare, attributed to John Taylor. The National Portrait Gallery, London. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

This is a thematic project whose overall aim is to be a example of how a registry could attract content and to expose it for further development. The plan is to explore the concept of ‘tactical aggregation’ by building a registry of online resources relating to the life, times and work of William Shakespeare.

The project is now out of the scoping stage, with the first offering having its focus on ‘the Scottish play’ for use in a CultureHack Scotland event. As the focus widens to Hamlet and other plays, the registry will support ‘actionable metadata’ on exciting content from providers such as the Bodleian, the British Museum, the RSC, National Library of Scotland and the Folger Library.

The emphasis will be on providing open APIs (the machine-to-machine interface) in order to ease access for developers who will, in turn, create new and imaginative applications with the data, demonstrating the value of aggregated metadata and similar registries.

Will's World project summary

DiscoverEDINA

This is work intended to open up data managed and value-added at EDINA. Project activity includes development of:

a ‘web service’ facility that will extract metadata from and embed new metadata in multimedia content, with a particular focus on adding geo-tagging
crowd-sourcing functionality, initially delivered as a feature within JISC MediaHub, to store and then make searchable, metadata contributed by users. Available openly as part of the existing metadata aggregation, the intention is to provide this metadata to the collection owners of the content

There is also further work on exposing data from SUNCAT, which provides information of the journal holdings of over 80 research and university libraries.