Linking You RDF Vocabulary

November 20, 2012November 20, 2012 Joss Winn Further Work data, RDF. model, vocabulary

Chris Gutteridge at the University of Southampton has created an RDF Vocabularly based on the original Linking You data model.

Terms which link an organisation to common webpages, such as a contact page or “about” page.

A few changes have been made to terms to make them useful outside academia. It is generally expected that the targets will be HTML documents, but in some cases it may be other formats, such as a PDF prospectus.

Namespace: http://purl.org/linkingyou/

This vocabulary is based on the Linking-You project performed by those clever chaps at Lincoln University. It has not been endorsed by them. The RDF version of the linking-you toolkit was created by Christopher Gutteridge.

A formal XML vocabularly was the first of the recommendations from our original Linking You project and we are very pleased to see the data model being reconsidered and developed in this way. We hope it makes a useful contribution to the new data.ac.uk initiative, which Chris is helping to co-ordinate.

This is the second iteration of the Linking You data model. Can you think of ways to improve it? If so, leave a comment here. Thanks!

Update to survey of institutional URIs

April 23, 2012 Joss Winn Analysis URIs

A few months ago, Jamie Mahoney spent several tedious hours looking at a further 66 HEIs’ websites, recording their URI syntaxes. It builds on the work of Alex Bilbie, who looked at an initial 40 HEIs for the Linking You project. You can see the combined spreadsheet on Google docs. It requires further analysis and colour coding, but may be of interest to some people in its current state.

#lncneu meets #jiscLinkU

November 4, 2011 Joss Winn Project Plan deliverables, follow on, funding, objectives, phase two

JISC recently announced a funding call for projects that wish to apply the Linking You Toolkit. The intention is that up to ten institutions are funded to build on and implement the Toolkit, with support from the original Linking You project at the University of Lincoln. As the support project, we too have to propose to JISC a plan of what we will do and how we will contribute to the programme of funded projects. I thought that other people writing bids for this call might be interested to know what they can expect from us, should they be funded.

Below is the relevant bit of our submission to JISC. What it means in practice is that we identify ways we can support you; that we respond to your feedback on the Toolkit itself, in effect developing it as a collaborative effort; that we extend our own research in this area to the benefit of the programme (and the sector); and that we build the necessary tools to allow you to implement an agreed data model that is common across all funded projects.

Introduction

Phase Two of the Linking You project will build on our initial efforts to examine the use and role of identifiers on HEI’s websites. We will respond to recent peer-review of our project ‘toolkit’, expand our initial comparison of university websites and develop tools to help institutions undertake the recommendations we made. Furthermore, we will support other institutions that wish to undertake an assessment of their own use of identifiers and work with them to develop and implement the toolkit. The ultimate objective is to work with other HEIs in implementing an agreed data model for HEI websites that is easy to implement and widely used across the sector, adding value to university websites and improving access to information for website users.

Use Cases

The Linking You project produced a toolkit for HEI Web Managers to encourage them to re-consider their use of identifiers as well as offer an abstracted data model that could improve the SEO and user experience of their site, as well as working towards a basic, common data model for the UK HE sector. The web is now fundamental to the activity and idea the university. The Toolkit provides a standard way for users to think about their institutional URI structure, making it easier for people (and their browsers) to both remember HEI web addresses and locate where they are in the web site. It also helps prepare institutions for the world of linked data by proposing a clear and concise model for university website data, making smooth integration with other systems easier and faster. A good URI structure can be easily understood by both humans and machines.

Although URIs are increasingly being obfuscated by developments in browser design, they are also increasingly being integrated into browser search functionality such that the benefits of providing clear, plain language URIs has never been greater. As well as providing subtle benefits to website visitors (and your SEO), technical staff working in universities should benefit from a consistent approach to URIs so that it is significantly easier for them to manage the relationships between resources, as well as making it simpler to produce documentation which refers to URIs that make sense. Alongside this, universities will be able to implement an efficient method of redirecting users to their intended destination when a resource has moved.

By developing our Toolkit further in collaboration with a number of HEIs, and responding to their feedback, we expect to further refine and expand upon our initial project outputs and demonstrate the value of our approach to the sector by developing a critical mass of users.

Overall Aims and Objectives

Institutions will benefit from thinking about a logical and human readable URI addressing system for online services. By working with the toolkit and the proposed extensions to our original work, they should experience:

Better IT systems integration.
Improved navigation of virtual spaces.
Appropriate conventions for differing technology platforms i.e. mobile/desktop devices.
Future proofing against non-sustainable URI management practices.
Ability to ‘design with data’
Improve discoverability of resources (and SEO)

Final Project Products

An improved toolkit including an agreed data model and complete comparison of HEI websites
Mapping tools for Web Masters to apply the toolkit model to their websites
A demonstrator aggregation application
A peer-reviewed journal paper on the use of identifiers in the HEI sector

A critical review: Notes from a recent meeting

August 22, 2011 Joss Winn Discussion meeting, notes

Last month, we met at JISC HQ with a number of people to discuss the work of the Linking You project. We compiled some rough notes that are available on Github. Overall, the project was very well received and our discussions led to a refining of the data model that we had produced. We’ll be updating the model and tweaking our recommendations soon.

www. is deprecated

May 5, 2011 Nick Jackson Discussion domain, www.

It’s true. The “www.” part of a web address can be considered deprecated and unnecessary. There is no technical or logical reason for websites to have the “www.” in front of the address. So, why do we do it?

It turns out that Lincoln are actually quite forward thinking in this regard. Our website is perfectly accessible through “http://lincoln.ac.uk” and “http://www.lincoln.ac.uk”.

Some slightly more elaborate universities still fail this basic test though. As a result, we’ll be recommending that the “www.” part of addresses is deprecated in the Linking You framework as unnecessary, pointless, and a waste of four perfectly good bytes.

Thoughts?