Working with Research paper data using ORO and XML

David Clover  15 June 2010 16:13:58

Henryk in my team is starting to untangle the richness of the XML data now available from our Library's ORO (Open Research Online) service so that we can put tailored lists of research papers into our various types and styles of websites. Academic staff are already adding their papers to this service and it has had some notably good press recently as the ORO blog shows.

Many years ago, we developed our own database - MaCuData - but this was superseded by ORO as a University resource. The trick is to get the data from the database onto a website - made with any authoring system - Notes, CM, Dreamweaver etc. in such a way that it shows the current and latest items submitted to the ORO service.  

At last we have an impressively detailed XML feed from the library - here's an example - and there are also variants with more or less detail in them. At its most detailed, we would be able to use this to present properly formatted scholarly citations using one of the various citation formats in common use.

The aim is to design a user-driven selection tool that anyone in the Faculty (and perhaps the University) can use to enter parameters about their username, the group or project they are involved in, the level of detail required and the style, and then we'll deliver a snippet of code that they can put on their web page. All they will need to do is amend their ORO item with appropriate tags and they'll then show up in the desired context automatically. Behind the scenes, we have a JAVA engine which collects and parses the XML and then populates the code snippet so that it appears to be an integral part of the web page presented to the reader. We've already got a successful pilot running showing the result for the last 20 research papers submitted to ORO from all parts of the MCT Faculty on our Faculty Website research page. We'll be experimenting with some simple CSS formatting on this page to show the items as clearly as we can. We'll be adding a similar feature to the automated and personal 'pro-forma' personal pages on our MCS, Maths and Stats, Computing and CRC websites soon.

Here's a block diagram to show what's going on:

Here's an example of the snippet script in action:

• Comments [3]