IESR Progress Report, January 2005
Summary
- Title of project: Information Environment Service Registry
- Project Manager: Amanda Hill
- Lead Institution: University of Manchester
- Project Partners: UKOLN, University of Liverpool
- Duration of Award: Jan 2004-Feb 2005
- Period of Report: Aug 2004-Jan 2005
1. Grant Statement
I confirm that the project development is being conducted under the terms agreed in the initial contract with JISC.
2. Aims and Objectives
There have been no changes to the overall aims and objectives outlined in the project plan. These were the following:
- a. Software development
- b. Content expansion
- c. Evaluation
- d. Dissemination
3. Overall Approach
There have not been any changes to the overall approach of the project, although software development has been subject to delay, first through the absence of a key member of the team, as described in the last report, and then through the impact of the replacement of the MIMAS hardware platform in October and November 2004.
4. Project Outputs
Software Development
- Work has begun on developing an OAI-PMH service for IESR that will supply single entity descriptions in either simple Dublin Core or full IESR XML. As part of this work, the Meta-Registry has been enabled as a Cheshire database.
- The IESR web search service has been enhanced to allow the inclusion of service type in a search.
- A first draft of an XML schema for IESR metadata has been produced. Various further changes have been made to the IESR metadata definitions, described more fully in section 8.
- The IESR application and web site have been moved onto a new server at MIMAS.
- A copy of the IESR data is being worked on by Emma Tonkin at UKOLN to investigate providing a UDDI view of the IESR.
Dissemination
A workshop for users and potential users of the IESR was held at the Institute for Historical Research in London on 12 January. This gave the project team a chance to describe the work of the project and to explain where it fits in to the wider picture of the Information Environment. A report of the day's events and copies of the slides shown is available.
A new website has been developed for the IESR. Many pages have been rewritten and the content has been re-arranged in line with usability recommendations, to help the various user communities of the IESR to easily locate relevant content.
Pete Johnston, Andy Powell and Ann Apps attended the Dublin Core 2004 conference in Shanghai. Pete chaired a meeting of the DC Collection Description Working Group and gave a presentation on the NISO Metasearch Initiative, in which he referred to the work of the IESR. Ann attended this CD Working Group meeting and also presented her paper 'A Registry of Collections and their Services: from Metadata to Implementation', which generated a considerable amount of interest from colleagues from Germany, Finland, US, Korea and China.
5. Project Outcomes
Ann Apps, Pete Johnston and Andy Powell attended the workshop 'JISC Common Services in the Integrated Information Environment' in London on October 27, 2004. The purpose of this workshop was to discuss the viability of common development of services that perform the same function within the three sectors: JISC IE, e-learning, and e-research.
A number of meetings were held with potential users of the IESR and other stakeholders:
- AMAZE consultants in regard to the ESRC Information Centre project (17/08/04)
- Katie Anstock, in relation to use of the IESR by TALIS (31/08/04)
- Dan Rehak and Kerry Blinco about the E-Learning Framework (2/11/04)
- Contact with Chris Awre about liaison with the CREE project
- Caroline Williams about liaison with RDN about record quality (21/12/04)
- LSE and Oxford data librarians (Kate Sloss, Luis Martinez, Margaret Robb and Mark Janes) about their proposed bid on cataloguing datasets (11/01/05)
The Subject Portals Project successfully demonstrated use of information accessed through the IESR's Z39.50 service. A presentation on this work was given at the 12 January workshop.
Contact with the OCKHAM project in the USA has continued. A meeting between the two projects has been arranged for the 4 March 2005 in Manchester.
The project was also contacted by Christine Reed of GetRef in Edina, and it was agreed that the projects would work together where possible.
Leigh Morris has been working with the Framework Scoping Study project, funded by JISC, in its analysis of the functional elements which make up services in the domain of electronic resources.
6. Stakeholder Analysis
The workshop meeting on 12 January was a good opportunity to gather feedback from the stakeholder community about the direction of the IESR and the future development of the Service Registry. A summary of the discussion held on the day Is available. Feedback from the delegates was very positive, and a number of issues were raised which will be acted upon in the course of the next phase of the project.
7. Risk Analysis
As mentioned above, the main problem with progress in this phase of the project has been the delay in development work caused by the MIMAS hardware replacement programme. This programme of work has now been completed.
8. Standards
There have been no large scale changes in the standards to be used.
Various changes have been made to the IESR metadata to make it more consistent with the Dublin Core data model and to increase its usability. This has included: moving the wrapper terms Collection and Service from the 'dcmitype' namespace to the 'iesr' namespace; moving the administrative metadata to outside the wrapper entity; adding inverse links between entities, e.g. from service back to collection.
9. Technical Development
The underlying software platform, Cheshire II, and the development approach remain unchanged.
10. Intellectual Property Rights
All descriptions held within the IESR are subject to a Creative Commons licence. Data providers implicitly agree to this licence when supplying the data.
A new rights field has been added to the IESR administrative metadata that accompanies each entity description. This requires that the administrative metadata is always retained with the entity metadata description when the metadata is reused.
11. Project Partners
The project partners remain the same.
12. Project Management
Pete Dowdell left the team and has been replaced by Emma Tonkin, who is taking forward the UKOLN research package on using UDDI as a mechanism for delivering IESR information. Amanda Closier also left UKOLN at the end of December.
As predicted in the previous report, involvement of staff in a major project at MIMAS to replace the main hardware platform for many services (including IESR) has had an adverse impact on the development work on the IESR. That project has now been completed, and the IESR website was successfully transferred in November 2004.
13. Programme Support
Ann Apps spoke to Rachel Bruce about UDDI in summer 2004.
Alan Robiette assisted the project team in their submission of a further proposal for funding to the JCIIE in November 2004.
14. Budget
There has been no significant overspend or underspend in this reporting period.
15. Workpackages
The tasks scheduled for this reporting period are listed below. Those that have not yet been completed have been affected by the two-month delay in the project's development timetable. Work has started on the availability checking service at Liverpool.
| Task Number | Task | Complete |
|---|---|---|
| 2.1 | Metadata review | Yes |
| 2.2 | Devise XML Schema | Yes |
| 2.3 | Further metadata review | Next phase |
| 3.1 | Populate IESR | Yes |
| 3.2 | Provision of OAI interface | Progressing |
| 3.3 | Provision of editing interface | Next phase |
| 3.4 | SRW interface | Next phase |
| 3.5 | Automatic update of records | Next phase |
| 3.6 | Alerting service for new records | Next phase |
| 3.7 | Maintenance | Yes |
| 4.1 | Cheshire support | Yes |
| 4.2 | Cheshire documentation | No |
| 4.3 | Availability checking | Progressing |
| 5.1 | Data checking | Yes |
| 5.2 | Maintain data creation guidelines | Yes |
| 5.3 | Contact potential content providers | No - awaiting editing interface |
| 5.4 | Devise data inclusion policies | Yes |
| 6.1 | Liaise with potential users | Yes |
| 6.2 | Test the IESR | Yes |
| 6.3 | Produce guidelines for users | Yes |
| 6.4 | Provide support for users | Yes |
| 7.1 | UDDI research | Progressing |
| 8.1 | Maintain website | Yes |
| 8.2 | Write articles | Yes |
| 8.3 | Give presentations and papers | Yes |
| 8.4 | Run workshop for stakeholders | Yes |
| 9.2 | Report on stakeholders' requirements | Yes |
| 9.3 | Evaluate IESR against project proposal | No - moved into next phase |
16. Evaluation Plan
It seems sensible to move the evaluation package into the next phase, in light of the delays to development progress in this phase, Amanda Closier's departure from UKOLN in December, and the continuation of funding for the project into a further phase.
17. Quality Assurance Plan
Procedures for quality assurance remain the same as those in the previous progress report.
18. Dissemination Plan
The list below details the dissemination activities of the project team in this reporting period and plans for future promotion of the IESR. Ann Apps's paper for DC2004 was one of only ten full papers to be accepted for this high-profile conference.
- 'Developing an invisible service: the Information Environment Service Registry' : a presentation by Amanda Hill at Digital Resources in the Humanities, September 2004 (abstract available)
- Apps, Ann. (2004). A Registry of Collections and their Services: from Metadata to Implementation. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications (DC2004- Metadata Across Languages and Cultures), Shanghai, China, 11 - 14 October 2004. ISBN 7-5439-2412-9. pp 67-73. (self-archived version of full paper available)
- 'Update on the IESR' in the CD-Focus Newsletter, November 2004
- A workshop for potential users of the IESR was held on 12 January. A report is available.
Forthcoming:
- An abstract has been submitted to NceSS2005: First International Conference on e-Social Science. Apps, Ann. 'A Middleware Registry for Discovery of Collections and Services.'
- Ann Apps has been invited to write an article about IESR for an 'eportals' edition of ASSIGNation (ASLIB Social Sciences Information Group and Network Journal).
- The IESR and OCKHAM projects have submitted a joint 'project briefing' proposal to the CNI Spring Meeting in Washington D.C., due to be held on 4 and 5 April.
19. Sustainability Plan
The project team have been involved in the JISC's Sustainability Study, which focused on the IESR and the Join-Up projects. As a 'proof-of-concept' project, the IESR has not yet developed a sustainability plan.
Amanda Hill, February 2005