Speakers
Description
Summary
Scientific communication not only concerns documents published by the official scientific publishers but also related information published by media aimed at other target groups like policy makers, companies and the general public. This information often has another form than the ‘traditional’ scientific publication, but its content is clearly related to it. In many cases it concerns application oriented publications, policy documents, guidelines, comments/reviews, but also non-specialist or newspaper documents, visual material, etc. This material is often made by non-scientists and is not published by scientific publishers.
In order to meet the above mentioned need for ‘enhanced’ scientific communication the aim of the ESCAPE-project is to extend the existing infrastructure of repositories of scientific publications in such a way that it will be possible to identify, describe, preserve and present aggregations of related objects (documents, videos, datasets, etc.), not necessarily produced by an individual author or group of authors. The applications developed, the aggregated publications environments, can be seen as elements in the service layer of the OAI data/services model, without requiring complex changes in the mode of operation of traditional repositories to deliver objects as an item in an aggregation with other objects.
Resource maps define a group of objects and determine the nature of the relations that exist between them. Additionally, resource maps offer access to these objects and can be edited by specified library personnel or scientists themselves. To realize the potentials we are developing a repository for OAI-ORE resource maps and an editor for creating and changing resource maps. The repository will be based on Fedora 3.1, reusing its built-in RDF support. In order to be useful to the end-users, the system needs to be able to describe various types of relations. For this purpose we investigate whether the existing vocabularies are suitable or new vocabularies need to be developed. Use of existing vocabularies is preferred in order to maximize compatibility with other systems.
Another topic is the discovery of resource maps from the individual objects. OAI ORE describes a few possible methods to realize resource map discovery; in this project we test the feasibility of these suggested methods.
Considerable attention is given to the dissemination of the acquired expertise and knowledge about the application of the tools developed in this project. Guidelines will be devised that make it easy for repository managers to make known if, and how, their holdings are part of a resource map. At the end of 2009 a working prototype will be delivered, which can be used in a wide variety of contexts and will be in use by the three research groups participating in this project.
ESCAPE is a collaboration of libraries, in their role of data and service provider, and scientific research groups as the demanding parties in this project. The participants of this project are two Dutch university libraries (University of Groningen and University of Twente), three research groups (Psychology and Physics of Fluids both from University of Twente and Law/University of Groningen) and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
