ESCAPE 2
Scholarly Communication - Infrastructure
Status: Completed
Aim
The Web makes new types of communication possible in the world of science and scholarship. Researchers wish to make their publications available online in combination with other publications or research material, thus enabling them to substantiate their research findings, but also to show how they can be utilised. ESCAPE gives them the tools they need to create these combinations.
The ESCAPE editor makes it possible for end users to create links between various items of digital material and identify the significant relationships between them. This is more than just a hyperlink from one document to another; a hyperlink tells you only that the documents are linked but not how or why. ESCAPE, however, defines the relationships in “Resource Maps” that are stored in a Resource Map Repository.
The aim of ESCAPE2 is to improve the “proof of concept” ESCAPE tools (the ESCAPE editor and the Resource Map repository) so that other institutions can install and use them (along with the accompanying manual) to create, store, and present Enhanced Publications (using the InContext visualisation tool), without the local repository needing to be altered.
Results
At the start of this project, ESCAPE was still in the “proof of concept” phase. The project results have improved the ESCAPE tools so that they can now be used as an editor for creating relationships between various items of digital material by end users (what technical specialists call an RDF editor).
Examples of Enhanced Publications created using ESCAPE:
Improvements achieved:
- The ESCAPE editor user interface has been improved.
- Linking to an OpenID has been simplified.
- The “My ESCAPE” function offers end users all the functionality necessary to create and manage Enhanced Publications (or “aggregations”, as they are referred to in ESCAPE).
- Upload functionality has been added, making it possible to upload files that are not yet available on the Internet. The “attach a file” function generates an URL and stores the file in the Fedora repository (as yet without a persistent identifier).
- File metadata already available on the Internet is copied automatically. After entering the URL for the website where the item data can be found, the ESCAPE editor retrieves HTML META tags, OAI ORE resource maps and DOI metadata and lists them in a table. The end user can then checkmark the data that should be copied.
- The ESCAPE editor includes a manual (in English) for editors (http://escape.utwente.nl/editorManual).
- To add extra vocabularies or relationships in Escape, see http://code.google.com/p/surf-escape/wiki/Ontology.
- An ESCAPE installation manual has been developed that can be found on the Google Code project site: http://code.google.com/p/surf-escape/wiki/GettingStarted?tm=6
- The technical documentation has been extended and can be found at: http://code.google.com/p/surfescape/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk%2Fdoc%2Ftechnical%20documentation
- Once ESCAPE is installed, the following template will appear: http://escape.utwente.nl/show/surfrdf-aggregation. Users can then make adjustments as they see fit or decide to adopt their institution’s house style. The result can be seen in the examples given above.
The software is open source and can be downloaded here.
Future
DANS is working with SURF to set up an Enhanced Publication Desk that will offer ESCAPE tools to end users enabling them to link research data to publications. The desk should be online by the end of 2011.
In addition to assisting in creating Enhanced Publications, ESCAPE can also help create all sorts of aggregations of related items. For example, ESCAPE can be used to create aggregations of SURFshare results. There are also plans to offer ESCAPE to researchers through their publication list so that they can link a publication from there to related items.