JISC

Overview

The Materials Research School at Loughborough University currently has an 'Equipment Database', an online catalogue of laboratory equipment, workshop machines and specialist tools.

Accessible to any member of staff or student to search for an item to borrow, book out or hire for teaching or research use. This project will make significant enhancements to the system and provide the public views of the website (for other institutions or companies to use) as well as linked data for other web services to exploit.

The whole enhanced application, the 'Kit-catalogue', will be made available as Open Source software for any institution or company to install.

Aims and objectives

By using the open source 'Kit-catalogue' (Kit Catalogue) system within their own institutions, organisations will be able to work towards more efficiency, utilising the assets already in existence and lessening the need for duplication of material assets to become a more sustainable campus.

Benefits include;

• reduced need for heating and occupation of additional space within buildings for duplicated equipment;
• avoids unnecessary purchasing, manufacturing and shipping of products;
• maximises opportunity for re-use of specialist equipment locally by HEIs, industry and Small to Medium Enterprises (SME).

Project methodology

The system developer will work closely with end-users and carry out the following tasks:

• Usability evaluation and interviews with stakeholders, including potential new adopters of the system from other HEI's
• Re-purposing of equipment database and development of the Kit-catalogue
• Adding additional content and encouraging more users both in house and externally
• Make available the Kit-Catalogue system to the community
• Creation of open linked data
• Creation of use cases and documentation of effective institutional practice and cultural change issues, in the use of the Kit-catalogue
• Final evaluation.

Anticipated outputs and outcomes

The project will produce the open source Kit-Catalogue system along with supporting documentation, use cases and a foundation for a community of users and engagement with the linked data community.

The potential for UK HEIs, of having many institutions using this way of making their equipment more discoverable both internally and externally, will have cost saving and sustainability benefits for all, as well as raising the profile and maximising exploitation of research assets of UK HEIs internationally.

For example, once implemented at many UK HEIs, an end user either from higher education or industry, could use a third party service to search for a specific piece of equipment (e.g. a bench-top gas chromatography system) to hire or use within a certain postcode.

Technology / Standards used

The Kit-Catalogue will be written in PHP using a MySQL database. In the first instance a straightforward but accessible web service to query the data will be provided e.g. utilising simple query string parameters and JSON. Then phase 2 would layer on more sophisticated functionality to provide a SPARQL endpoint to enable access to the open semantic RDF data.