Progress report 2007-08

SWORD : Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit

SWORD Home \| SWORD Wiki \| SWORD Project Background

Workpackage one - the evaluation of existing standards and specification of a deposit protocol are complete. The project decided to make use of the ATOM Publishing Protocol (APP). APP is an application-level protocol for publishing and editing Web resources and is principally designed for blog posts and associated files (e.g. images). APP has a built-in extension mechanism that SWORD has made use of in order to support its own parameters, as defined in workpackage one. Use of APP is a positive step towards integrating repositories with the web by leveraging a standard that is increasingly being used by applications such as google and flickr. The SWORD profile of APP has been produced by the project [1]

Workpackage two - technical development has been progressing over the summer. Work on Intrallect, DSpace and Fedora development, plus the development of a reference client are almost complete and we are nearing a point of being able to publicly announce the availability of various outputs .
- EPrints development has been delayed by various circumstances which have affected staffing of the EPrints team in Southampton; JISC has agreed a short extension to allow EPrints to complete their development over the next month.

Workpackage three - user testing of the implementation has been held back to allow for completion of the technical workpackage (WP2). We are currently exploring a number of possibilities for testing, including asking a number of existing projects to test the SWORD outputs and write short case studies about their experience; or hosting an event to enable interested developers to get together to test the SWORD outputs. The SWORD project manager has been contacted by various developers, interested in working with the SWORD profile, including developers from the JISC-funded SOURCE project, arXiv, Microsoft and the ICE project in Australia.

Workpackage four - the SWORD project manager has delivered a number of presentations on SWORD, including one to the Open Repositories 2007 conference in San Antonio, Texas and one to the CETIS Metadata and Digital Repository SIG.

Workpackage five - the SWORD project manager has changed jobs during the project, but has agreed with UKOLN who are leading the project to complete work on the project. Instead of creating a web site, the SWORD web pages are included as part of of the DigiRep digital repositories wiki, hosted by UKOLN and managed by the Repositories Research team [2].