Use Case Description – What happens?
Activity – Enable students and researchers to identify resources outside the established focus of their local collection. Like cross-domain aggregation, this is potentially open ended (assuming there is no definition of the boundaries of interdisciplinary enquiry); however faculties and research groups may be able to define large scale crossovers and specific interests (and to do so proactively and with a reasonable life expectancy). Consider, for example, the technical, linguistic and social disciplines brought together in semantic web development.
Volumes – Variable but necessarily restricted to be of value
Actors – Subject specialists to define the requirement, data owners and an aggregator; al these actors may be within one or a small number of institutions
Data involved – this may involve records across the full range of LAM, repositories and data sets
Workflows – this will involve faceting as well as aggregating.
Current Examples – (a) The OpenART project, a partnership between University of York the Tate and Acuity Ltd, is exposing linked open data for “The London Art World 1660-1735″. Drawing on metadata about artists, places and sales from a defined period of art history scholarship, the dataset offers a unique picture of the London art world and links drawn to the Tate collection will allow exploration of works in their contemporary locations; (b) The Discovering Babel project seeks to exploit the literary and linguistic resources in the Oxford Text Archive and the British National Corpus through enhancements to resource discovery to facilitate interaction across research infrastructures.
Intended Benefits – What is the business case?
Data Owner – Putting resources to better use, some of which may be minimally utilised in their native settings.
Aggregator – Meeting the evolving needs of scholarship and research and also supporting the evolution of undergraduate curricula.
End User – Enabling rich connections that might be out of reach or hard to make whilst the resources remain in local collection silos (which may be departmental as well as institutional).
