ROADS: Resource Organisation And Discovery in Subject-based services
- Project web site
- http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/roads/
- Programme area
- Access to Network Resources
- Contact details
- Paul Hollands, ROADS liaison & Training Officer,
Institute for Learning and Research Technology, University of Bristol, 8 Woodland Road, Bristol, BS8 1TN
Phone: 0117 9288479 Fax: 0117 9288473
Email: paul.hollands@bris.ac.uk
Project description
as of 22nd May 1997
The ROADS project contributes to the broad aims of the Electronic Libraries programme by providing a set of software tools and a standards framework for the information gateways being developed by the Access to Network Resources Projects.
ROADS supports the comprehensive resource discovery services offered by ADAM (Art, Design, Architecture & Media Information Gateway), Biz/ed (Business Education on the Internet), OMNI (Organizing Medical Networked Information) and SOSIG (UK Social Science Information Gateway). ROADS software is used by UKOLN to provide a search facility for information on eLib projects and is also being adopted for use by other Internet services outside the eLib programme.
The ROADS project is making progress in achieving its four original objectives which are to:
- make a significant contribution to the development of a sharable, distributed systems platform for resource discovery services
- support emerging subject based services with tools, advice and guidelines
- work with subject based services to involve information providers in the description of their own resources, in order to make them as useful and accessible as possible
- implement and test emerging standards and to improve UK participation in international standards making activity
ROADS partners are active in Internet Engineering Task Force working groups and UK and international consensus making bodies at technical, service and organisational levels. The standards based ROADS tools, methods and protocols which result from this close involvement enable:
- subject specialists to build and maintain information gateways - catalogues of selected high quality Internet resources
- end users to make complex, transparent searches across distributed information gateways