Evaluation of the Information Environment Service Registry (IESR)
Project description
The IESR is a JISC-funded project, which aims to make it easier for other applications to discover and use materials which will help their users' learning, teaching and research. The project partners are MIMAS, UKOLN and the University of Liverpool. The project website can be found at http://iesr.ac.uk/
In essence the IESR is a machine-to-machine (m2m) middleware service which is intended to provide a single source of high quality service descriptions which other services, and particularly user-facing services such as portals, can utilise to provide access to distributed content and transactional services for users within the UK higher and further education communities. The descriptions are designed not simply to portray collections and services in the traditional sense of collection/resource description but to provide the technical details which enable services to interrogate other services. The advantages include the removal of the need for duplication of such information by each service provider, including the dangers of inconsistency between copies, and the opportunity to provide quality assurance to an agreed standard.
The metadata provided in the IESR is based on available standards, primarily Dublin Core and extensions such as the RSLP Collection Description Schema. The use of application profiles ensures consistency of encoding schemes, vocabularies etc. Data is held in the registry as XML records and there are interfaces for both machine and human interaction, the latter to enable tasks such as data checking by contributors. Machine interfaces enable both querying and harvesting.
The CERLIM Evaluation
The CERLIM Evaluation had two strands.
- documentary analysis provided a formal grounding for the work, but also explored how the community are interpreting the aims of the project and assessing its achievements
- interviews with key stakeholders from within the project partners, the JISC, service providers, and ‘typical’ institutional users of the IESR, explored the issues which they think will lead to the development of a useful and successful registry service.
A report was delivered to the IESR Project Team in January 2006
For further details about this project please contact:
Margaret Markland,
Research Associate
CERLIM
The Manchester Metropolitan University
Department of Information and Communications
Geoffrey Manton Building
Rosamond Street West
Manchester M15 6LL
Tel: +44 (0)161 247 6142
Fax: +44 (0)161 247 6979
Email: m.markland@mmu.ac.uk