The Scheme’s new website has been running in public β format now for just over a week; in that time we’ve been adding lots more data to the database. Our staff have managed to add 1000 new records in the last week, many of these with images. You may wonder why you can’t see all of these as a public user, and this is all down to our workflow model. The following simple methodology is employed to provide access to records:
- Quarantine – visible to: creator of record, Finds Advisers, Admin
- Review – visible to creator of record, Finds Liaison Officers, Finds Advisers, Admin
- Validation – visible to all registered users
- Publication - visible to all registered users and has been checked for accuracy by Finds Advisers.
However, after the initial release, there is a lot more sitting around waiting for phased deployment to the new site. These deployments include:
- REST applications programming interface or API
- RDFa throughout view templates (we currently have FOAF embedded on contacts pages as a test; I may have done it wrong, if so tell me!)
- Historic Enviroment transfer spreadsheet (will be out next week)
- More context switched data views and switching on of geoRss feeds now that we’ve been stable for a week.
- More text extraction across the site. We already use OpenCalais to tie records together on our database, but it will be employed across the data that we ingest from the Guardian, TheyWorkForYou and dbpedia
- More geo enrichment from Yahoo! and geonames services. We already use Yahoo’s geoplanet to enrich findspots without National Grid references, and to obtain elevation and various other data on our records. We’ll be using it to give spatial context to our news and events. I’ll explain more about how we used these services elsewhere.
- Publication of the Staffordshire Hoard artefact records (produced by Kevin Leahy) and images taken by our efficient Treasure team.
- A new module for tracking the progress of Treasure cases through the system and a large amount of metadata attached
- A Google Analytics module that will leverage data obtained via their API and redisplay it openly on our site. I’ve been developing analysis of top content etc.
- Expansion of the data that we’ve reused from TheyWorkForYou – specifically to find objects found within parliamentary constituencies. The Scheme is good at lobbying, cf. the Early Day Motion campaign of 2008!
- More personalisation of interfaces
- Fix all issues raised by our staff and all those users that have kindly submitted comments
- Expansion of comments across more areas of our site – the short trial seems to be proving to work very well. We’re changing and updating finds records thanks to the comments and error reports that our users have submitted.
- Use geolocation to provide you with objects found within a predefined radius of your current location.
There’s probably more to come, but as we’re very AGILE, we’ll come to that later!
