JISC

Overview

Building on work from the The Enhanced Tagging for Discovery (EnTag) project the PERTAINS project aims to deliver service enhancements to the UK national aggregator services of research library OPACs (COPAC) and Intute the database of web resources for higher education. Over 120,000 records of quality internet resources across all subject disciplines are described in the Intute database and over 34 million records from over 50 libraries make up the Copac database. Intute and Copac have grown out of library conventions and have traditionally taken a structured approach to categorising and classifying their content; through classification schemes and assigning keywords.

Aims and objectives

Overall, this project explicitly aims to leverage network effects, respond to changing user expectations and more effectively exploit Intute’s and Copac’s UK presence as powerful aggregators of learning and research materials.
Objectives of PERTAINS: 

• take build on the En-Tag project to produce a transferable tag recommender tool for the Intute and Copac services

• provide the Intute and Copac user community with a tag recommender tool which allows users to tag with a tool developed in conjunction with their needs as defined by them

Project methodology

The project is a collaboration between the Mimas, the JISC funded National Data Centre based at The Univeristy of Manchester and the University of Glamorgan. Mimas is responsible for the project management, the user testing of the tag demonstrators and JISC reporting. The technical development of the tag demonstrators, the backend interface and the technical design and development of the demonstrator is a joint effort from University of Glamorgan and Mimas.

The first activity of the project is to review Intute and EnTag activity to date and draw up lessons learnt document and then select appropriate content and vocabularies. DDC will be the underlying knowledge structure which will be used to create SKOS Concepts.The web services developed are then deploy into the existing Intute and Copac interfaces to create tag recommender demonstrators and user tests carried out before further refinement and assessment of suitability for service deployment.

Anticipated outputs and outcomes

Outputs

• A demonstrator transferable tag recommender tool for the Intute and Copac services 
• A report on suitability for service deployment 
• A report which fully details the findings of the user testing 
• Final project report

Outcomes

• Search and retrieval related tasks can be personalised and therefore are easier to perform 
• Potential for links between and familiar functionality across two national information services 
• Provision of functionality in line with expectations derived from popular wider Internet environment websites 
• Copac and Intute sharing of functionality -- dramatically increased potential to leverage network effects 
• Future proofing and scalability of the service, especially in the context of Web 2.0 and adaptive personalisation 
• Sharing of expertise across Copac and Intute

Technology / Standards used

• JSON
• jQuery
• Perl
• Dewey
• Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS)
• Resource Description Framework (RDF) (what SKOS is based on)
• Microsoft .NET framework / C# language for development of the web services