RCS Project Blog

The JISC Research Communications Strategy (RCS) project is one of our sister projects based at the University of Nottingham. They have just announced the release of their new blog. It is designed to be a place for RCS news and updates as well as a place for discussion regarding research communications. They encourage readers to add comments and make suggestions.

Please do have a look and let them know what you think.

The RCS is working to investigate and coordinate many of the emerging themes, ideas and developments in the field or research communications at the strategic level, and looking at advocacy to academics as one of the key issues in the adoption of open access.

You can see the blog at http://rcsproject.wordpress.com.

ISKO-UK Conference on Linked Data

Yesterday I attended the ISKO-UK one-day conference on Linked Data. I have to admit to attending with an interest (what will be the impact of Linked Data on institutional repositories?) but also a degree of scepticism. The Semantic Web/Linked Data movement is about ten years old now – ten years that I spent in commercial web companies with some high profile clients but never once had a query regarding Linked Data. We all know about the growth of the web in its first ten years but Linked Data seems to be finding it harder to catch on. Perhaps this is because there doesn’t yet seem to be a compelling commercial application. It was telling that the commercial companies on the attendees list were generally Linked Data service providers, not commercial companies looking to find out what Linked Data can do for their company. I think one of the main drivers of growth for the web was that companies realised that they could use it to make money and it isn’t clear, to me at least, how this applies to Linked Data at the moment.

Repository Fringe 2010

I’ve just returned to the office following a few days at the successful Repository Fringe 2010 event held in the very interesting e-Science institute building in Edinburgh.

For the RSP team this began with our RoMEO API workshop pre-event organised in conjunction with the SHERPA team.  This gave the attendees an opportunity to find out about the planned changes to the RoMEO service and how they might affect the API.  The workshop also invited feedback from participants on how they want to make use of the API and how they would like to see it change. Given the scale of the upcoming changes this was a great opportunity to influence the development and make the API an even better resource for the community in future. The invitation was taken up with great enthusiasm and provided a wealth of useful feedback for the SHERPA team to consider.