The project has produced two main deliverables: (1) a prototype of a standard exchange format to expose researcher’s identity metadata and to deposit this metadata into the Names Project database and (2) a case study using Heriot Watt University scenario to show the feasibility of the model proposed by the project.

Prototype:

The prototype was conceived to act as a lightweight identity URI resolver system comprising

1. a suitable XML exchange format to define the researcher’s identity, and
2. a basic RESTful interface to make reusable this researcher’s identity.

We intended to expose data for the Names Project using a Names exchange format. But, unfortunately the Names format was not ready during the WattNames project. Therefore a decision was made to use a generic XML format based on the FOAF language (RDF-aware) and the ontology developed at the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), University of Southampton, to define the researcher’s identity.

A sample data containing the names and email addresses of 132 researchers and academic staff from the Department of Physics was obtained from the School of Engineering and Physics, Heriot Watt University, with the condition that the data be only used for research purposes and not made publically available. This data was formatted using the FOAF and ECS ontology, as shown in this example (the data is not real and do not refer to any real person working or studying at Heriot Watt University)

Case Study:

We approached the Information Technology (IT), Technology & Research Services (TRS) and the Human Resources Data Protection (DPR) offices at Heriot-Watt University to obtain their advice and help to identify and implement a model to resolve the identity of academics and researchers at Heriot-Watt. Although the University has been very supportive with the idea of having a mechanism to unambiguously identify members of its staff, there were some concerns with the data protection and the implications of exposing personal information without the explicit consent of each involved staff.

The IT Department helped us to produce diagrams showing the databases used by the systems and applications handling researchers and research data. However, TRS
asked us to don’t include any copy of these diagrams in any report that is going to be publically available. Nevertheless, the main issue was to use staff data to feed the Names Project. From the start we requested PDR to provide us with only a minimal set of information already publically available on the web for all the academics and researchers working at Heriot-Watt University. We presented to TRS and PDR the University of Southampton case as an example of the advantages of having a system to resolve the identity of our staff for other external systems. Basically we wanted to expose the same information that the Heriot Watt “People Finder” web page returns when a user searches for the details of a staff member (http://www.hw.ac.uk/home/people-finder/.) The idea was to use the institutional email address as unique identifier. Using the email address is not a perfect solution, but it was a good approximation taking into account that we didn’t have access to other identifiers such as staff payroll numbers.

Although DPR allowed us to use staff metadata from the Department of Physics to develop the prototype, it was not possible to obtain the permission to expose this data via a publically available API on the web. An important factor for the success of WattNames Project was to be able to be a data source for the Names Project. This was not possible to achieve because (1) we weren’t able to complete the procedure requested by the University to obtain the authorisation from each member of the staff to deposit their names and email addresses on an external database (Names) and (2) the Names Project didn’t have a proper exchange format or a web application to communicate with our API. The manager of the Names Project suggested us to upload data from WattNames to Names via FTP. This suggestion was not accepted by DPR as our initial request was that the project prototype would feed Names using an agreed
standard exchange format. Uploading academics’ metadata on an external FTP server was not considered to be part of the project.

Basically the Case Study has exposed two issues

1. An institution is likely to be concerned with the uploading of staff metadata on The Names Project database, even if this metadata is already available on the web, and
2. The Names Project needs to have a proper web application to enable institutions to keep control of their metadata stored in the Names database.

Project Team Names

• Santy Chumbe <S.Chumbe@hw.ac.uk> RA-PI
• Lisa Rogers <l.j.rogers@hw.ac.uk> RA
• Rogert Rist <R.J.Rist@hw.ac.uk> ICBL Director

Project Website: http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/WattNames/

PIMS entry: https://pims.jisc.ac.uk/projects/view/1588

Table of Content for Project Posts:

1. WattNames Project
2. WattNames SWOTT Analysis
3. Engagement with Related Projects
4. Study of Relevant HW Information Systems
5. Light at the End of the Tunnel
6. Cool URIs for WattNames
7. Final Progress Post ]]> https://wattnames.wordpress.com/2011/06/20/final-progress-post/feed/ 0 32 santychumbe https://wattnames.wordpress.com/2010/06/30/cool-uris-for-wattnames/ https://wattnames.wordpress.com/2010/06/30/cool-uris-for-wattnames/#respond Wed, 30 Jun 2010 13:38:45 +0000 http://wattnames.wordpress.com/?p=28 This post intends to explain the rationale behind the technology used by the WattNames prototype. It basically describes the use of “303 URIs” as the strategy for effectively using URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) to create links between RDF descriptions and the web.

   Using RDF, specific resources from the real world (e.g. people) can be published on the Web allowing others to read those resources and publish their own information, linking to existing resources. This forms a distributed model of the world, where different web applications can view and work with the same resources’ data.  Wattnames makes use of this RDF-based model.

   On the traditional Web, URIs are used primarily for linking and viewing Web documents in a browser. However, URIs can be used to identify real-world objects like people, and even abstract ideas. In short URIs can identify things. Thus Wattnames prototype main task is given an URI identifying a researcher (person), to use the Web as a lookup service to retrieve a researcher description containing relevant information and links to related data.

   For example this hypothetic URI http://www.hw.ac.uk/people/john.smith should return RDF data for machines and HTML representation for humans. However, URIs are meant to identify either an identifier for a Web document or and identifier for a thing. WattNames use a solution based on the HTTP status code, “303 See Other”, to solve this conflict. As we cannot use the regular HTTP 200 status code to return a thing, we use the 303 status code to direct the user to a document which has information about the thing.

   WattNames server is configured to answer URI requests with a 303 status code and a Location HTTP header that provides the URL of a document that represents the resource. For example, http://www.hw.ac.uk/people/john.smith would be redirected to http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/wattnames /john_smith.html or to http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/wattnames/john_smith.rdf

   WattNames uses what is called “Content-negotiation” to decide to return either HTML or a FOAF file containing embedded RDF and set the Content-Location header to the URI where the specific representation can be retrieved. The following image illustrates the “Content-negotiation” involved when WattNames answers URIs requests.

   ]]> https://wattnames.wordpress.com/2010/06/30/cool-uris-for-wattnames/feed/ 0 28 santychumbe WattNames Content-negotiation illustration https://wattnames.wordpress.com/2010/06/28/light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel/ https://wattnames.wordpress.com/2010/06/28/light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel/#respond Mon, 28 Jun 2010 11:09:09 +0000 http://wattnames.wordpress.com/?p=23 After various meetings and exchange of emails with staff from the Human Resources (HR), Information Technology (IT) and Technology & Research Services (TRS) departments of our University, an important milestone has been achieved for the project. HR as well as IT and TRS have expressed their support for the WattNames Project aims.

   At the beginning of the project, we worked with the Information & Planning Officer (TRS) and the Information Systems Architect (IT) at Heriot Watt University. The meetings with IT and TRS helped to clarify the technical work and conceptual aspects of the project. The University library was also very supportive. They quickly understood the technical benefits of having an institutional identifier for uniquely and reliably identifying researchers in a way that would also enable inter-communication and integration of the institutional database systems associated with researchers and research data. It was important to count with the participation of IT, TRS and the Library as those departments have the expertise of handling researchers and research data systems. Thus, the Institutional Repository (IR) is within the remits of the Library. TRS is in charge of administering the outputs produced by the University researchers and IT maintains the database systems handling academic staff information. However, when the time came for them to provide us with access to the information they were handling, we found a problem. None of the three departments were able to give us access to the data or even to provide us with a restricted access to researchers’ basic information. It clearly became apparent to us that we needed to include in the talks to the real administrator of the data: The University Human Resources Office (HR). Liaising with HR staff was a different thing. For obvious reasons the University administration is very reticent regarding anything involving staff data. To start it was necessary to explain HR officers the background and the rationale behind the project approach. HR had many questions for us. For example “Why do we need to use URIs?”, “Why do we need to do this if most if not all of this information is already in the public domain?”, “Have all University staff being informed by the project about what their data is going to be used for?”, “Is the corporate webmaster involved with this?”, “Are we going to give researchers’ data out to third parties?”, “What about the FOI op-outs for researchers that don’t want to be identified with particular kind of research?”, “Where is the data going to be hosted?”, “Who is going to take care of the data exposed via URIs?”, etc.

   In addition to email communications, a face-to-face meeting arranged between the Project team and the HR advisers were crucial to clarify questions and devise a way forward. The intervention of the University Information Commissioner’s Office (UICO) was a favourable turning point. Their advice was that the University corporate communications office should do an all academic staff email and also put it on the official newsletter and events web pages to inform academics about the project and give them a reasonable period of time to opt out. UICO advised us that the names of the University Freedom of Information and Data Protection Officer (UFIDP) and the Project Manager should be given to academics as people to contact.

   The Project and HR teams are now working together in preparing the communication to be sent to academics as advised by UICO. We have prepared a draft letter for the corporate communications officer, which after it has been reviewed by the UFIDP officer, will be proposed to the University corporate communications office.

   To sum up, the initial University apparent reluctance to collaborate with our forward thinking proposal have been remedied with significant communication and by gaining the support from the appropriate institutional stakeholders. Thus the University officers looking after academic staff data have indicated that they consider the aims of the WattNames Project are very worthwhile for the institution and that they are very supportive of it.

   ]]> https://wattnames.wordpress.com/2010/06/28/light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel/feed/ 0 23 Lisa Rogers https://wattnames.wordpress.com/2010/05/31/study-of-relevant-hw-information-systems/ https://wattnames.wordpress.com/2010/05/31/study-of-relevant-hw-information-systems/#respond Mon, 31 May 2010 10:44:13 +0000 http://wattnames.wordpress.com/?p=20 Workpackage 2 of the WattNames project involved studying the institutional identify management systems and the institutional research information systems. We have received a good source of information from TRS which we have used to create diagrams showing the architecture of the systems relevant for the project.
   ]]> https://wattnames.wordpress.com/2010/05/31/study-of-relevant-hw-information-systems/feed/ 0 20 Lisa Rogers https://wattnames.wordpress.com/2010/05/31/engagement-with-related-projects/ https://wattnames.wordpress.com/2010/05/31/engagement-with-related-projects/#respond Mon, 31 May 2010 09:49:44 +0000 http://wattnames.wordpress.com/?p=17 The Names Project is working to uniquely identify individuals and institutions involved in research in higher education in the United Kingdom. The WattNames project is comparable with the names project as our aim is to is to trial an institutional identity resolver based on URIs to enable the production of reliable and unambiguous identification of researchers from Heriot-Watt University.

   We have been in contact with Amanda Hill, Project Manager and Dan Needham, Lead Developer for the Names Project. Our interest was to inform them that we were in the process of creating a sample data-set of researchers from Heriot Watt University, and to see if the Names project could provide us guidance to upload our “data sets” on the Names prototype. Amanda and Dan were very helpful. We were informed on the plans of Names for an automatic method of uploading data to Names database to make this process relatively straightforward to do.

   Amanda also invites us to be part of the Expert Panel for Names, which basically is a list of people that the Names Project contact
   intermittently for advice and information. We have been added to the list, as someone with experience of trying to deal with names in an institutional setting.

   We have also had contact with Sean Farrell from our own institution. Sean is an E-Learning Technologist from the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance (SUPA) working at the Engineering and Physics School (EPS) We spoke about the work we are doing for our respective projects and found some potential points of mutual collaboration. Specifically Sean is Working for the ERIScotland Project involving universities from St Andrews, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen, as well as the Danish company Atira who develop the ‘PURE’ research information  system. Their aim is to export research information using the standard data format CERIF-XML
   to enable these universities to and combine information about researchers, and research outputs in  Physics and Astronomy into a
   single portal. ERIScotland is a proof of concept, but if the pilot is extended in subsequent years, then we may be able to replace the manual methods that we currently use to compile information from the eight universities. Such a process could radically change the way we gather, check and share information about staff, students and research papers. We have agreed with Sean to keep in touch, to share data identification from EPS staff and to share some information about what is happening in our respective projects.
   

   ]]> https://wattnames.wordpress.com/2010/05/31/engagement-with-related-projects/feed/ 0 17 Lisa Rogers https://wattnames.wordpress.com/2010/02/17/wattnames-swott-analysis/ https://wattnames.wordpress.com/2010/02/17/wattnames-swott-analysis/#respond Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:33:39 +0000 http://wattnames.wordpress.com/?p=14 The WattNames project team has met to revise the Strengths and the Weaknesses points of our project as well as the Opportunities and the Threats conditions that could benefit the project performance.

   One strong point of our project is that we count with the interest, support and participation of the main sources of information for our work, which are the three departments within our own University dealing with research and researchers data (the University Technology and Research Services (TRS), the University Information and Computer Services (UICS) and the University Library) We also count with strong support from the Names Project. Our strength also includes: the knowledge we have of the Web of Data concepts; our expertise on developing RESTful APIs and XML based exchange metadata formats; the experience of our team members that have worked in related projects; our links with our community of users; and that the fact that our planned budget give us a lot of options for gathering feedback from our community of users.

   On the other hand, we have found that we were lacking of hands-on expertise in using Web of Data concepts in the development of identity resolver systems. We also have to deal with time constraints as our project members are part of different short projects, competing for our attention. One additional weakness is our lack of enough knowledge of the internal structure and relationships of the University databases holding researchers’ information.

   An opportunity for the project is the large interest and activity that is occurring in the area of resolving the identification of researchers worldwide.

   Some threats have also been identified, such as the time frame for testing the API would be too short; the poor integration among the University systems as well as the difficulty we are having in identifying the content of relevant “shadow systems”.

   We are taking note of these points in order to find ways to use and capitalize on our strength, improve our weak points, make use and benefit from our opportunities and alleviate each threat!

   ]]> https://wattnames.wordpress.com/2010/02/17/wattnames-swott-analysis/feed/ 0 14 santychumbe https://wattnames.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/hello-world/ https://wattnames.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/hello-world/#respond Wed, 27 Jan 2010 09:54:12 +0000 WattNames is a JISC funded Virtual Research Environment Rapid Innovation (VRERI) project.  The aim of the WattNames project is to trial an institutional identity resolver based on URIs to enable the production of reliable and unambiguous identification of researchers from Heriot-Watt University.
   • Project Tag: WattNames
   • Project Team: Roger Rist, Santy Chumbe, Lisa Rogers all from ICBL, Heriot-Watt University (HWU).
   • Project Support: Names Project, TRS – HWU, UICS – HWU and HWU Library.
   • Project Website:  http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/WattNames/
   ]]> https://wattnames.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/hello-world/feed/ 0 1 Lisa Rogers