Mobile EDINA

EDINA is going mobile. Over the next few months we will be developing a range of clients for your iPhone and Android handsets, combining our existing services with the opportunities afforded by internet equipped, GPS enabled smartphones.

The JISC MediaHub app will allow users to search and browse over 500,000 images, videos and audio files. Searches can be based on the user’s location, to find items in the local area. These may include news film covering local events over the last 100 years, museum artefacts or archaeological remains in the area, and historic and recent photographs of local landscapes, people and architecture.

The SUNCAT app will allow users to find copies of journals, and also discover the nearest library to their current location; maps and directions to the library will also be offered.

Two geospatial apps will concentrate on enabling students to use Ordnance Survey mapping on their handsets, to enable students to download maps for use in field trips where signal coverage might be poor. We want to enable users to be able to geo-annotate using a variety of digital media and have these annotations stored and made accessible. In the process, we will develop additional geospatial middleware to supplement the JISC infrastructure, ie, allow proximity to be expressed in resource discovery requests, interoperable annotations.

The following YouTube videos outline our direction of travel:

If you have any comments or suggestions and would like to influence what we are doing, we would very much appreciate hearing from you at edina@ed.ac.uk.

We anticipate releasing the apps Summer 2012 though there will likely be test releases before then.