Start date: 1 May 2003
End date: 31 August 2003
Funding programme: PALS Metadata and Interoperability programme (phase 1)
JISC theme(s): Information environment
The project is carried out by EEVL, the RDN hub for Engineering, Mathematics and Computing, at Heriot Watt University in partnership with a range of publishers: Pro-Talk Ltd, a publisher of technical and professional websites and newsletters; Centaur Communications Ltd, a publisher of leading trade publications and GoJobsite, UK’s leading Internet recruitment service.
The applied nature of much engineering study and research means that the information needs of engineers often extend beyond scholarly peer-reviewed literature to include engineering trade information, publications and services. Numerous engineering trade information sources are currently produced by a variety of independent commercial publishers and companies. Their content includes industry news and analysis, product and market information, news about technical development, materials and processes, job vacancies and reviews of software.
The bibliographical control of engineering trade publications is however extremely patchy. Despite the fact that many such resources are freely available on the web, they are delivered from a large number of different sites, without aggregation of content. As a result, access to, and exploitation of, trade information is difficult.
Of the many commercial and business news feeds currently available, very few address the engineering sector’s particular need for detailed, less financially-oriented, industry-specific items including product news, industry news and job news. There is therefore a pressing need to develop better interoperability to trade publication information. Most publishers have little or no experience or knowledge of the JISC information Environment, or of RSS. It is therefore important that the issues associated with the delivery and presentation of metadata are explored and disseminated.
To address the above-mentioned problems, EEVL will work together with the consortium publishers to expose the metadata of their engineering trade information content in RSS, to explore the issues associated with this process and to investigate the aggregation of this content within a JISC funded Engineering Portal.
The intended deliverables of the project are:
- RSS feeds from a number of engineering publishers
- Guidelines, documentation & advice on RSS production
- Report on the project experience including individual reports from different publishers
- Content which could be utilised within an subject portal demonstrator aggregated news feed service which would incorporate aggregation, searching, browsing, landscape selection and alerting
- Paper(s) that disseminate project results in relevant publications
RSS - A Primer for Publishers and Content Providers is now available at http://www.eevl.ac.uk/rss_primer/. This document is primarily intended for a non-technical audience who require an overview of RSS in order to allow them to make decisions regarding the possible use of the technology. It introduces and explains the concepts behind RSS and addresses some commonly expressed concerns. The guidelines also provide recommendations for good practice, case studies on RSS production and links to tools and specifications which will provide useful starting points for those tasked with actually producing RSS feeds.