CIP Logo

Disclaimer

This is a pilot service, providing navigation over only a small fraction of the data held by the University. As a pilot, no guarantee is offered as to the validity of the information found here.

Welcome to the Content Integration Project

About this software

This is the pilot produced by the Content Integration Project (CIP), a six month undertaken at the University of Bristol by Web Futures during 2008. The pilot work has been funded by JISC and builds on a prototype funded by HP Labs Bristol. Our continuing thanks goes to the Faculty of Engineering and Research & Enterprise Development (RED) at the University of Bristol who have worked with us at ILRT to develop requirements for this project.

What can this software do?

The CIP pilot automatically integrates central researcher and publications data from the University's Datahub and Iris respectively, along with ILRT's own project data (stored in the department's own databases) and similarly Faculty of Engineering project data. It also automatically aggregates and matches this information (where applicable) with some project data pulled from the EPSRC website. We have created four 'entry points' to the resulting database: users may choose to click on one of the 'Quick Links' on the right as a way in to browsing the data. Once in, you can continue to browse through People or Research Activities etc. by refining the result sets via selecting categories on the left. Some of the categories have further sub-categories. The categories you have selected at any one time are displayed to you just above your results list. Please note that the database here is not complete for the University as this pilot software has a limited data capacity.

How CIP came about

As is common in large organisations, a known problem at the University of Bristol is that while there is a wealth of Web, Systems and departmental data that is interrelated (for example in terms of subject specific data, or data about particular research projects), it is not trivial to produce applications which give people a seamless search or browse across the full range of such information. Integrated 'views' across these distributed but related sets of data are not normally possible without considerable human effort and yet would be extremely beneficial both to University departments and faculties and also to central or interdisciplinary University bodies (such as Research & Enterprise Development (RED) and the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS)). Tightly scoped to just three University departments - RED, Faculty of Engineering, and the ILRT, and focusing on a small set of content integration scenarios, CIP has made an early investigation into the types of departmental databases that exist outside of, and alongside, the data in central University systems.

Technical information

This pilot combines Oracle 11g RDF datastore support with user interfaces based on SWED software to investigate to what extent the use of Semantic Web technology can provide user-friendly data join-up with minimum effort. The annotations are provided by Caboto, which is another Web Futures project.