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National Rural Knowledge Exchange

CETIS Metadata and Digital Repositories SIG6th May 2008

Roger GreenhalghInformation Manager (Information Architect ?! )

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1976 - joining things up

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What are Knowledge Exchanges .?• Centres of Excellence in work between Universities, Business and

the Community, funded by HEFCE since 2004 (but often based on earlier ‘3rd Mission/’Reach-out’/’Extension’ activities)

• There are 22 of them nationally, and they are normally Regional Consortia.

• Normally the ‘One stop shop’ or Gateway for Regional Universities to promote their consultancy activities, access to facilities, Graduate Employment Schemes, short course and conference programmes.

• Maximum funding is £500k per year, which translates to 7 or 8 staff per Exchange…

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The National Rural Knowledge Exchange

A 14 University Consortium:

NewcastleCentral LancashireHullKeeleBirminghamHarper AdamsWarwickWorcesterRoyal Agricultural CollegeWest of EnglandGloucesterWrittleReadingBournemouth

Initially planned to ‘broker’ (personally & via email) the following Knowledge Transfer services of the 14 Partners:

- Joint projects

- Consultancy

- Bespoke training courses

- Lab and field trial facilities

- Visiting speakers

- Graduates on short or long-term placements schemes, including Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (aka Teaching Company Schemes)

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Practitioners

Universities & their Rural Departments ResearchInstitutes

PLCs

Are Research Priorities right?

Consultants

Individual clients

Clubs and Hubs

Land-based

Colleges

Academic Journals

Trade Press

Product sales

licensing

A Rural Knowledge Supply Chain..

???

Academic conferences

Open Days

Shows

Talks, meetings

Technical conferences Skills &

business training

Graduates

LANTRABus LinkRDAs FBAS,RDSEtc etc

Talking to friends

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The NRKE project aims to help by…

• Establishing a National Rural Portal, specifically aimed at:– Including all parts of the supply chain as members…– Universities, Colleges, Research Institutes, Practitioner Clubs, Sectoral

Organisations…– Allowing members to upload their current contact details, services and

‘events’ through on-line forms i.e. to be in control of their own information on the database-driven portal.

– Having the portal map driven so that locating events and organisations by area is straightforward:

a National Rural ‘What’s On’, and Who’s Who?’

– Providing search facilities by technical subject area (around 130 subjects).

• And by establishing a 'honeypot'…– Providing access to University and College work brokerage through the

Portal.

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Portal focusCurrent distribution of rural organisations in our ‘National Rural Directory’

National coverage

+

local and regional relevance and usability

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NationalRural Portal(2004-2005)

• Aimed be good at:

• Signposting and mapping

• Finding events

• Finding news

• Did not intended to :

• Publish technical articles

• Publish review articles

• Hold research findings…

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NationalRural Portal(2006 - to date)

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Listing and Searching

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Nationally and regionally…

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Organisationprofiles

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Relationships between organisations

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Discoverability• Content is

veryfindable byour audience…

• Usually more so than its source !!!

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Syndication

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The challenge is not the technology

• RSS is a bit like sex…

• you only really understand it when you've tried it out !

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JISC e-infrastructure

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www.nationalrural.org website

RSS / ATOM /XCRI / XML data feeds : inbound and outbound

bulk email updates

WorkflowBusiness logic layer

Presentation layer

Data access layer

Data storage layer

AD provider SQL provider

Active Directoryname service

SQL2005 database

Google map tiles

Access management

Serialisation: self-instantiation & self-actualisation of business objects Process scheduling

Content management & moderation Location geocoding

NationalRural web application

Land-based Libraryweb application

www.landbasedlibrary.org website

Accessions management & moderation

Full text indexing

MS Windows file storage

Video-streams

We

b-s

erv

ice

s &

AP

Is

Object inter-relationships

Micro-sites Sub-sites

Access & ownership

N-tiered infrastructure

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XML instantiation / serialisation

• The ultimate innormalisation…

• …by making stuff handle-able consistently

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Aggregation

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The challenge• Vision

• Boundaries

• Skills

• Perception