Nov 29

Thanks to a gruelling sprint by Hugh and Ian (and with some help from Patrick McSweeney), we’re pleased to be able to announce the final prototypes of our tools:

dotAC Explorer
A faceted browser interface for JISC-funded UKHE data
dotAC Coreference Editor
A graphical frontend to the Coreference Service
Three datasets of linked data for UKHE
All visible via the RKBExplorer interface:

Documentation will appear in due course at http://dotac.info/docs/.

Enjoy!

Sep 03

Hello from Manchester, and the JISC Rapid Innovation in Development workshop in Manchester (or to be more precise, the City of Manchester Stadium in all its sky blue glory).

Progress on dotAC so far has been good, but we’re aware that we’re still laying a number of foundations in parallel for the final service.

We’ve joined EuroCRIS, the organisation that develops the CERIF data format (we’ll be posting a commentary and critique of CERIF in the near future) and have developed a mapping from CERIF to a selection of common Semantic Web vocabularies (FOAF, BIBO and Dublin Core for a start). We’re now working on a translator that will take the XML serialisation of CERIF and produce an equivalent RDF description; it isn’t clear how many funding bodies will be exporting data in CERIF within the lifetime of the project (it’s being used within the EC in places, NERC have provided us with some data, and EPSRC have said that they’re evaluating it), but we intend to be ready for them when they start.

On the coreference side, we’re working on a graphical frontend for our coreference service that should make it easier for repository managers to identify the scattered instances of a given researcher (our preliminary discussions with librarians at Southampton suggests that this alone would be a useful outcome for dotAC), which can then feed back into the repository.

On the repository side, we’re finalising our RDF export from EPrints 3 (predominantly to the same ontologies used for CERIF).

We’ll be publishing further details of these deliverables both here and on the main project website as they’re completed – it’s getting to the point where these separate threads are naturally converging.