Ziel
Social science archives contain the data sets from many studies by government and academia. The data sets are described in metadata, which uses a set of terms defined in a common multi-lingual thesaurus. The project will develop multi-lingual tools to support user access to the data stored at social science archives across Europe and to integrate it with data from other domains. This will make the information available throughout Europe for users to retrieve and communicate in the language(s) of their choice, as a basis for further research, policy making and planning by individuals, companies and government organisations. The data is coded alphanumeric data from many thousands of social studies, so the data itself does not require translation, only the metadata, defining the fields, code values etc. used to interpret it.
Objectives:
1. Research and evaluate a metadata model and representation (in XML and RDF) for social science datasets to allow their integration within and across data archives.
2. Develop and evaluate a multilingual thesaurus to be used to index and access social science datasets in data archives.
3-5. Develop and evaluate a multilingual query and retrieval tool to assist queries and retrieval with explanations, drawing on the multilingual thesaurus to allow queries to dataset archives to be made in several languages with keyword and phrase translation in the retrieved data and metadata.
6. Develop and evaluate tools to support the construction and maintenance of datasets in an archive using automatic indexing drawing on the multilingual thesaurus.
7. Evaluate an XML metadata server using the metadata model and representation for social science datasets and the multilingual thesaurus.
Work description:
To construct the multi-lingual interface, a multilingual thesaurus of social science terms must be constructed which can be used by archives across Europe. Also a metadata model will be developed using the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard for metadata to allow it to be accessed throughout the World Wide Web. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) allows the construction of semantic definitions of terms in the thesaurus, making them more interpretable by users, and provides a standard basis for query and retrieval tools. These two elements will provide the basis for world wide access in a user's own language to these valuable data resources.
Multi-lingual access through the World wide web will be demonstrated and evaluated using an XML database to store the metadata, and the existing data archives of the eight national archives involved in the consortium to ensure coverage of requirements and completeness of evaluation. Tools will be developed to construct and maintain the metadata. Standardisation of results through ISO & W3C as well as commercial exploitation are planned.
Milestones:
Results will be:
A multi-lingual thesaurus in at least 4 languages
A metadata model in RDF XML
A prototype of multilingual query, retrieval and explanation tools.
A prototype of construction and maintenance tools for data archives using metadata representations.
A prototype of an XML metadata server.
Full evaluation reports on trials by user organisations to validate the approach.
Wissenschaftliches Gebiet
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OX11 0QX CHILTON, DIDCOT
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