12. Projects

12.1 Learning and Teaching

Activity in the high profile area of learning and teaching (L&T) continued during 2007/2008. Of particular importance was the Jorum service, in which EDINA and Mimas worked collaboratively with a number of key organisations. A key development this year has been the decision by JISC to fund Jorum for another 3 years, and to extend the scope of the service to include providing an open access service for learning resources.

Jorum

Jorum was funded initially as a safe place to keep content created as output by projects and institutions in receipt of JISC investment. The Jorum service provides the JISC community with key benefits, including access to reusable and repurposable resources created by and for the community, and secure data management for institutions wishing to share content. Jorum provides both simple and more complex multimedia learning materials, which (when downloaded) run directly in local learning environments. It also provides freedom from having to renegotiate licences with third party content providers, and detailed metadata descriptions that are useful to teachers sourcing content for use in learning and teaching.

During Year 3 of Jorum Service-in-Development, Jorum established itself as a key repository of educational resources for the UK academic community. At the end of July 2008, 414 UK HE and FE institutions were signed up for Jorum User and 92 signed up for Jorum Contributor. There were 2,851 resources in the repository and 5,541 users were registered

The announcement of the planned new Jorum services has created considerable interest – particularly the open access service for which people are already offering to deposit resources. The Jorum team have been busy planning for the new services and are on track to launch them in 2009.

In 2007/2008, the University of London Computer Centre (ULCC) delivered a report providing functional and information models for preservation modelling, and a Working Preservation Policy for Jorum. In addition, Mark van Harmelen, co-author of the JISC-funded ‘Web 2.0 Content for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education’, delivered a report on Jorum and Web 2.0/social software trends. An important activity during 2007/2008 has been the Contributor Audit that used interviews to explore the factors motivating and affecting contributors

A range of training and outreach events were provided, promotion and support materials developed and updated, the Jorum website improved and further versions of the repository software brought into service. The helpdesk and project teams have continued to provide support for contributors and users.

Inter-working for L&T

It is important that EDINA works closely with other groups active in various aspects of L&T, including the following UK-based services:

• Mimas
• Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability Specifications (CETIS)
• HE Academy and its Subject Centres
• Centres of Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CETLs)
• JISC Regional Support Centres for FE
• Intute
• Netskills

JISC accorded the repository area significant attention and funding. Jorum fed into the process leading up to the JISC Digital Repositories Programme, and in return, derived benefit from other projects’ experiences.

A member of the Jorum team was a member of the JISC IPR Advisory Group. In addition, Jorum staff attended the JISC Repositories Programme, Legal and Policy Cluster meetings and had regular communication with other projects in the wider JISC community through membership of these two bodies.

Regarding international collaboration, JISC had key strategic partnerships with the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the USA, the Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) in Australia, and SURF in the Netherlands. JISC viewed Jorum as a key strategic area in which these partnerships were expressed. Jorum built upon and strengthened JISC’s strategic partnerships by meeting with representatives of these organisations, ensuring that high quality assistance and advice to national and international partners was provided. The Jorum team had contacts with the teams establishing national repository services in the Netherlands, Eire, Sweden and the USA.

12.2 Projects on Middleware Infrastructure

Shibboleth Development and Support Services: Access Management Expert Group

The SDSS project, which ran from April 2004 until March 2007, developed a successful pilot federation which was the fore-runner of the UK federation. With the acceptance of devolved Shibboleth-based authentication within the UK academic community, the focus of work has switched to providing expert group services and tools and to the development of core Shibboleth technology.

While the deadline for charging for the use of OpenAthens and the dropping of Athens support from JISC for services resulted in an increase in technical federation support work, with a consequential reduction in expert group work, the following are among the expert-group activities which have been undertaken:

• Windows-based Quick IdP Installer: the IdP installer, developed as a mechanism to enable inexperienced users to get started quickly, is now available for the Internet2 web site
• Internet2/MACE collaboration: this is ongoing with expert group members attending Internet2 meetings and contributing to forthcoming versions of Shibboleth
• Extensions to UK federation schema: extensions have been developed and included as part of the general evolution process
• Interoperable SAML profiles: in particular, development of a proposal for synthetic scopes for the school sector
• Federation Interoperability: preparation of an architecture paper on metadata interchange for Internet2
• Evaluation of a National Eproxy service: a study undertaken for JISC

EDINA continued to work closely with colleagues in JANET (UK) and Becta to develop and support the UK federation

12.3 Projects on Infrastructure for Journals and Articles

In recent years, EDINA has been responsible for a number of key projects in the JISC IE infrastructure for serials at both title and article level. Those continuing from 2006/2007 include the Depot, GetRef and GetCopy. Two new JISC-funded projects have begun: EM-Loader (Extracting Metadata to Load for Open Access Deposit) and a scoping study for a low-cost OpenURL resolver.

The Depot

EDINA, with the SHERPA team in Nottingham, launched the Depot in June 2007. The Depot, one of the JISC RepositoryNet support services, was developed to bridge the gap between early adopters of Institutional Repositories (IRs) and the establishment of a national network.

Funding until March 2009 has been provided by JISC. It offers a redirect service, known as the UK Repository Junction, to ensure that content that comes within the remit of an extant repository is correctly placed there instead of in the Depot. The Depot acts as a safe place until an institutional repository becomes available for the deposited scholarly content. In this way, the Depot avoids competing with extant and emerging IRs, while bridging gaps in the overall repository landscape and encouraging more open access deposits.

During 2007/2008, EDINA and SHERPA have continued to promote, support and encourage use of the Depot through contacts with institutions, researchers and funders. There have been a number of developments incorporated into the underlying eprints software, a mechanism to incorporate the UKAMF in Repository Junction, and active contributions to the Common Repository Interfaces Group (CRIG) events and repository-related conferences. There has been participation in the JISC-funded requirements analysis of the RepositoryNet support services that will help determine activity beyond March 2009.

EM-Loader

Funded as part of the JISC Repositories and Preservation Programme, EM-Loader (Extracting Metadata to Load for Open Access Deposit) is a one year project, in partnership with Textensor Limited. It demonstrates middleware that enables easier deposit of research papers through batch upload of extant, structured bibliographic metadata.

It has contributed to the work of the Common Repository Interfaces Group (CRIG) in the provision of shared infrastructure for digital repositories, taking forward into practice ideas mooted for a ‘deposit engine’. It will also have immediate practical value as this middleware can be employed to assist deposit into the Depot as well as offer a facility for repositories more generally, with potential to enhance metadata deposit through transfers and re-directs to institutional repositories (IRs).

Initially using web services interfaces based on SWORD, this middleware facility currently shows proof of concept having connected two existing services: the Depot and PublicationsList.org, the latter a web site for researchers to build a web page listing their publications with functionality for batch import of bibliographic metadata for a (personal) publications list from a variety of online sources such as PubMed, Web of Science, and from personal databases, such as EndNote, Reference Manager, BibTeX.

Scoping Study for a Low Cost OpenURL Resolver for the JISC IE

Building on experience gained from GetCopy, this study has reviewed the requirement and means of delivering a low-cost OpenURL resolver service for the JISC IE which would provide means for staff and students at all UK universities and colleges to locate the ‘appropriate copy’ for a given bibliographic reference. It is envisaged that such a service would also be deployable from subject and other thematic portals in the JISC IE as well as from library portals.

The first phase of the study has scoped the feasibility and potential uptake of such a tool and includes a gap analysis and requirements analysis. The second phase, to be carried out in the next reporting period, will design an architecture and explore potential business models with estimated costs to support and sustain such a tool.

GetRef

The Xgrain 5/99 JOIN-UP project developed a broker for cross-searching abstracting and indexing services and electronic tables of contents services within the JISC Information Environment. The University of Stirling has continued to use GetRef as its federated search tool for almost three years.

Trials of the service continue to be offered, along with helpdesk support and maintenance of the service. Further functionality that would enhance the service has been identified. The completion date for the additional year’s JISC funding has been extended until early 2009, during which time a service review will take place including work to more accurately ascertain need and requirements since the service was first offered in 2003/2004.

GetCopy

The ZBLSA JOIN-UP Project developed a linking tool that provided portals with the means to locate services pertaining to journals. The tool developed was used by EDINA under the brand name ‘GetCopy’. It connected discovery of a reference to a journal article with services providing the most appropriate full-text copy in printed or electronic form. GetCopy was designed to be lightweight and business-neutral by operating on existing permissions; GetCopy simply determined the location of appropriate copies, and directed the end-user accordingly.

GetCopy provided a default service for users who were directed to the OpenURL Router, but whose institutions did not have a registered OpenURL resolver.

12.4 Multimedia Projects

Visual and Sound Materials Portal Demonstrator Project

Work continued on the second, demonstrator phase of the project until completion in March 2008. In addition to the portal demonstrator itself, the project also delivered a final report that included:

• A draft collections strategy
• A draft policy to support the contribution of user-generated content
• A notice and takedown policy for user-generated content subject to complaint
• An external evaluation report containing initial options for future sustainability of the portal

The portal demonstrator will be available for another two years. EDINA is in discussion with JISC about any future funding and development of the portal.

12.5 Geospatial Development Projects

EuroGeoNames

EuroGeoNames (EGN) is an eContentplus-funded 30-month project (from 1 September 2006) aimed at delivering a federated gazetteer infrastructure, services and middleware services for Europe. (eContentplus is a programme funded by the European Commission.) Building on existing interest and extensive work on gazetteers (specifically GeoCrossWalk), EDINA assumed responsibility for developing the gazetteer data model and application schema. Engagement was predicated on gaining pan-European access to gazetteer data for the UK academic community, although data provider IPR issues remained to be resolved.

The EGN project is implementing an interoperable internet service to link and provide access to the official, multilingual geographical names data held at the national level across Europe. The target within the project funding lifetime is to aggregate data for between five and ten European countries by connecting their national databases in an interoperable ‘EGN infrastructure’.

The project consortium brings together partners from the public, academic and private sectors, embracing the full ‘value chain’, from data providers to technology partners to value-added service applications. These partners have well-established working relationships based on other work, including the feasibility study that was completed in advance of this proposal. This project will make a major contribution to opening up public sector information within a wider European spatial (geographic) information infrastructure. The project ends in February 2009.

GeoCrossWalk

The principal purpose of GeoCrossWalk is to provide a shared terminology service within the JISC IIE that can underpin geographic searching and georeferencing. The rationale behind the project is that there is currently no unified entry point to assist in geographic searching within the existing academic network, as each information provider/service adopts different geographic coding conventions (some use postcodes, others place names, some grid references etc.). GeoCrossWalk is designed to make geographic searching transparent by ‘crosswalking’ these different geographies and is analogous to a shared terminology service.

GeoCrossWalk as an infrastructure for georeferencing/geotagging UK academic resources has several different facets:

• A gazetteer database ‘GeoCrossWalk’ – a detailed database of geographical features, names and their associated geometrical representations. The gazetteer is a value added hybrid database sourced from a range of Ordnance Survey datasets
• A middleware layer Application Programming Interface (API) – a lightweight access layer that allows other services to query the gazetteer
• A geoparser – a natural language entity recognition service that can parse resources (text, html, xml) for geographic place names and relate these to the gazetteer (the geoparser can use different gazetteers if available but defaults to GeoCrossWalk). The geoparser provides a mean to translate implicit geographically referenced resources into explicitly georeferenced ones

GeoCrossWalk was selected by JISC as a pilot case to test the new transition from project to service process that is being adopted. As a consequence of this, JISC has agreed to transition GeoCrossWalk from a project to a service commencing November 2008.

GAP

Within the Discovery to Delivery area of the JISC Repositories and Preservation Programme, the need for domain-specific specialist metadata profiles for purposes of search and discovery across institutional repositories was identified. Subsequently, work funded 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). Using existing community adopted open metadata standards, GAP leverages well established international standards in describing geospatial resources within a Dublin Core Application Profile. Each of the other domain Application Profiles has as its focus the description of a particular class or genre of resources. GAP differs slightly in that it is intended to be used in conjunction with other profiles, and focuses on a specific set of characteristics (spatio-temporal) that may be applied to resources of many different types, the distinguishing characteristic being that they have some relationship with “place”. This allows a rich meta-metadata model to be used in describing resources, although inter-Application-Profile harmonisation routes are still being explored by JISC and the various projects. GAP has direct relevance to the EDINA ShareGeo repository (the follow-on to the earlier GRADE project) and to Go-Geo! A GAP has been developed, and implementation of this within repository software is being investigated. GAP commenced in April 2008 and is ongoing.

SEE-GEO

The Secure Access to Geospatial Web Services project commenced November 2006 and will run until October 2008.

Three demonstrator applications have been developed. The first shows how a combination of Shibboleth and GeoXACML may be used to provide access control to Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Map Services (WMS) without breaking the WMS interface specification. The second and third are based around an application which shows how census data from EDINA and Mimas may be accessed and linked at run time. This work contributed to the OGC process through being part of the Geolinking Interoperability Experiment. Security has been achieved at the portal by using Shibboleth and a portlet which configures geospatial content according to what the particular user is authorised to see and use. A further demonstrator has been completed showing how finer grained authorisation may be implemented at the individual Service Providers level.

This project was part of the JISC Grid OGC Collision programme and consequently had a strong standards liaison and dissemination theme. This led directly to the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between the OGC and the Open Grid Forum.

Following discussion with the JISC, a new Work Package was added in early 2008 to begin describing the use of geospatial interoperability standards within the e-Framework for education and research. This has involved engagement with e-Framework partners in Australia and New Zealand. Two workshops were also held in the UK consulting with the geospatial experts and users with the intention of arriving at recommendations to the JISC as to how they might most effectively progress the development of the UK Academic Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI).

Next steps will involve producing the final report and making recommendations to the JISC on how this work may most effectively be taken forward. In particular:

• Migration towards production geospatial Grid services
• Further engagement with the e-Framework partner countries
• Development and deployment of the UK academic SDI

Go-Geo!

Go-Geo! is an information portal to enable searching for geospatial datasets by interactive map, grid coordinates and place name, as well as the more traditional topic or keyword forms of searching. The portal was originally funded under the JISC 5/99 Programme and was the result of cooperative effort between EDINA and the UK Data Archive. In 2004 EDINA took over Go-Geo! and rolled it out as a trial service to the UK academic community. Using an ANSI standard, Z39.50-1995, the portal undertakes simultaneous searching across a number of data catalogues, including the national GIgateway service (and its network of geospatial catalogue services), and data catalogues provided by the ESRC. Using OAI-PMH, the portal also offers users targeted searching of metadata held at UK research data centres. In the last year, Go-Geo! geographic coverage has been extended to beyond the UK. Through an interactive map, users can now gain access to nearly 40 other national geospatial data portals.

Go-Geo! also acts as a geographic access point to more traditional types of resources e.g. papers, maps, images, within the JISC IE. It thus acts as a gateway providing a single access point to multiple resources from a geographic point of view. To do this and support cross-searching of geospatial data catalogues, Go-Geo! makes use of the GeoCrossWalk gazetteer (another service provided by EDINA).

To support the community of users of geospatial information, Go-Geo! also provides an organised collection of quality assured links to resources of use to those working with geographic data. These are regularly updated and new resources added.

To support the community of creators of geospatial data, Go-Geo! has developed Geodoc, a tool that enables users to create quality standards-level metadata. These metadata can be made available through Go-Geo! for viewing by users in the institution to which the user belongs or published more widely.

Go-Geo! is a critical component in the evolving UK academic spatial data infrastructure. On 6 June 2008, the JISC Content Services sub-committee (JCS) agreed funding for Go-Geo! as a service at EDINA for three years subject to the JISC Integrated Information Environment (JIIE) agreeing to fund the transition period. On 20 June 2008, JIIE members endorsed the funding recommendation. Transition funding was made available for 8 August – 31 October 2008. Transition of Go-Geo! to an operational service will be subject to an operational readiness assessment by JISC and approval from the JISC Content Services sub-committee on 12 November 2008.

ShareGeo

ShareGeo, a product of the JISC funded GRADE project, will be a geospatial data sharing facility based upon the GRADE demonstrator repository. ShareGeo is being integrated into the EDINA Digimap Collections suite of services for use by Digimap users.

As part of the 2005 Digital Repositories’ Programme, JISC funded the scoping of a geospatial repository for academic deposit and extraction (GRADE) project. GRADE investigated a number of issues relating to the role repositories play, including the development of a demonstrator repository.

ShareGeo will allow registered Digimap users to share and re-use derived geospatial datasets thus allowing data sharing to take place that would not have been possible previously but within the limitations of data licence agreements. Users will also be able to share datasets that they have created themselves that are not based upon third party data. In the longer term, the intention is to also create an open version of ShareGeo.

Due for launch in October 2008, JISC has provided a small amount of funding to assist with the transition of the GRADE demonstrator into a trial service. The project runs from 1 June 2008.

Key developments during the transition include:

• the upgrading of the underlying repository software to the latest version of DSpace
• redesigning the interface to align it with other Digimap Collections
• linking Digimap and ShareGeo registrations so that all current users of Digimap have access to ShareGeo without additional registration steps
• implementing appropriate data access mechanism to control access to licensed datasets
• increased number of accepted formats
• enhanced metadata for searching and querying
• clearer Terms and Conditions

EDINA is funding the operational aspect of the service from its own resources because it believes this service will be of significant value to the academic community. A review with respect to its continued operation will be carried out after one year.

Grid Enabling EDINA Services (GEESE)

The GEESE project ended in May 2007 with the submission to the JISC of the final report. The basic idea behind this short-term project was, in cooperation with the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) based at the University of Edinburgh, to investigate issues relating to the provision of EDINA services (bibliographic, multimedia and geospatial) on the UK e-infrastructure. The project was closely related to the SEE-GEO project (Secure Access to Geospatial Services) and built directly upon work undertaken as part of SEE-GEO. A demonstrator was created as part of GEESE and is available to show a web service (from the National Centre for Text Mining) being used to parse documents and generate keywords. These are then used to query multiple Z39.50 targets using a modified version of OGSA-DAI – the results are relevance ranked.

12.6 Continuing Access and Digital Preservation

CLOCKSS

As more and more content moves online, there is growing concern that this digital content may not always be available. CLOCKSS is an international digital preservation scheme for scholarly publications, initially journal articles. It has been built by and is being supported by a partnership of the world's largest scholarly publishers and the library community.

CLOCKSS began as a project in 2005 to investigate how to create such a not-for-profit, community-governed, secure, and multi-sited archive of web-published content. Taken together the publishers supporting the CLOCKSS initiative account for over 60% of such digital journal content. The University of Edinburgh was one of the seven founding libraries, with EDINA acting as a designated host for delivery of the triggered journal content.

Central to the operation of CLOCKSS is a distributed long term archive network, with routine ingest of publishers' current (and past) content into secure LOCKSS-managed storage under the stewardship of internationally-recognised and globally-distributed research and university libraries. LOCKSS, Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe, is the technology developed at Stanford University, using replication and automatic cross-checking of content to ensure integrity over time.

Following successful appraisal and demonstration of how CLOCKSS would respond to a 'trigger event' (when digital content ceases to be available online) the decision has been taken to move to full service. Agreements for publishers, archive nodes and hosts are being finalised. Fund-raising for endowment is planned to provide the necessary financial sustainability of CLOCKSS.