UKOLN was represented at the ROADS Workshop at the Wellcome Institute on the 8th August.
Lorcan gave a presentation on standards and technical issues concerning ROADS, Rachel spoke on
resource description formats and Michael referred to inter-operability issues and the mappings he had
been doing between IAFA / ROADS templates and USMARC. These draft mappings were published
on the WWW before the meeting and are available at the URL:
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/interoperability.html.
Further draft mappings from ROADS
templates to and from Dublin Core are in process of being compiled and will be published on the Web
shortly.
One suggestion that arose out of the ROADS workshop was that meetings should be arranged to discuss templates and technical issues. These took place on the 8th and 9th October at the Institute of Historical Research. Rachel and Michael took part in the planning of these days and Rachel chaired the Templates Workshop on the 8th October. Andy contributed to the technical meeting via e-mail.
The technical and templates workshops were designed to be part of the requirements process. Michael and Chris used the minutes from these meetings and other items collected from roads-liaison and open-roads to formulate a v2 requirements document for discussion at the requirements meeting at the Institute of Historical Research on the 7th November.
UKOLN (Andy) has built a database of eLib projects based on ROADS v1 and a PROJECT template for each eLib project has been created. This has been tested by a small group and following some consequent amendment this will be announced shortly. As part of this, Andy participated in the alpha testing of ROADS v1.
Initial investigation into adding harvesting functionality into ROADS has been done and some ideas based on the Harvest Information Discovery and Access System discussed via the closed-roads mailing list. UKOLN are also investigating the possibility of basing the harvesting code on the NWI (DESIRE) Web crawler software instead of (or possibly as well as) Harvest. It is envisaged that the harvesting code will not be tied to a specific release of the ROADS software but will take more of an add-on toolkit approach.
Zexi: a demonstrator is now in place, but requires further (largely cosmetic) refinement. The Europagate software (WWW to Z39.50 gateway) can be used to provide web access to multiple Z39.50 servers in parallel. In the set-up under development it is pointing to a subset of the V&A catalogue mounted using CNIDR's ISITE software and to the ADAM server via a Z39.50 to WHOIS++ gateway developed by Loughborough. Other services may be added in the future. It demonstrates the utility of standard interfaces and exchange formats.
Lorcan published papers mentioning ROADS in the July/August 1996, D-Lib Magazine and in the Times Higher Education Supplement:
A review of metadata formats written by Rachel was published in the October issue of Program:
ROADS will be represented by Rachel at the Fall 1996 meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information Task Force in San Francisco on 6/7 December. A selection of eLib projects have been invited to give presentations on their projects at this meeting. Frank Norman (OMNI) and Rachel will be giving presentations on ROADS. Some of the UKOLN metadata team will be attending the next MODELS workshop at Warwick (Integrating access to resources across multiple domains ) and will be working with the Arts and Humanities Data Service on a series of workshops on metadata in different subject domains (history, visual arts, performing arts, archaeology and others).
Page maintained by: Michael Day of UKOLN.
Last updated: 25-Nov-1996.