Nov 15

It’s been a quiet week in Lake WoebegoneSouthampton.

Actually, that’s a lie. While the new teaching year has been grinding on, we’ve continued to tie together the systems we’ve built.

One big WIN is that we can now get RDF descriptions directly from EPrints 3-based repositories. I’ll let Chris Gutteridge say it, since it’s his baby:

EPrints 3.2.0 Linked Data Support committed to SVN!! http://devel.eprints.org/id/eprint/23 , http://is.gd/4UrLc , http://is.gd/4UrLd #ep3 [from twitter]

We’ve been working with Chris during dotAC to make this happen (following some on-off discussions that date back to AKT). Chris was recently bitten by the Linked Data bug, and has been doing some sterling work on Linked Data-enhanced websites for the Web Science Trust and a number of conferences. Slightly galling, since they put to shame the Linked Data version of the ECS website that Nick built back in the day on the AKT project.

This is definitely a big WIN for us, because we now have a reliable way to gather SW-friendly publication data from participating repositories that is more transparent and sustainable than harvesting via OAI-PMH. All we now need to do is persuade repository managers to migrate to an up-to-date distribution of EPrints (at the rescheduled dotAC/EPrints training day, currently planned for the New Year) and we’ll be away…