Research and Education Space

What is RES? RES is the Research and Education Space. It’s a partnership between the BBC, Leaning On Screen and JISC. The aim is to make it easier for UK teachers, students and academics to discover, access and use material held in the public collections of broadcasters, museums, libraries, galleries and publishers.

How does it work? The platform indexes structured information about archive collections published as Linked Open Data (LOD) on the Web. The data is organised by the RES platform around concepts which end-users of RES applications may be interested in – the Vikings, William Shakespeare, the Battle of Waterloo and so on. Alongside this, RES also indexes information on how to access archive assets, all in a consistent machine-readable form.

What this means RES acts as an index across multiple collections. This means it can bring together disconnected information about the same concepts, so that users get a fuller picture than if they just went to a single collection. For instance, a user could find everything to do with the Battle of Waterloo from across the National Gallery, British Museum and any BBC programmes indexed by RES.

What this means By indexing the content of collections by topics users can find things based on their interests, rather than by having to know exactly what they’re looking for in the first place.

Why ‘open’? RES relies on open data, because it is letting people know what’s in your collection, but that does not mean that everyone has access to your collection for free. Using open data to tell people what’s in your collection spreads the word of what’s there, encouraging visitors, and use of your collection, on your terms.

Why ‘open’? RES recognises the difference between licensing data and licensing assets. While RES stipulates that data must be published under an open licence, the platform allows assets, be they images, audio or video files or other documents to be licensed in any way the owner chooses.

Why ‘open’? RES is also an open platform, because we believe there are so many potential uses of this information that we need to enable as many people as possible to use it. We have built APIs and a developer toolkit that allows people to build products and services that can make a real positive difference to those in education & research institutions

How do collection holders work with RES? RES needs your collections data to be published as linked, open data. This should be fairly straightforward – if you have a database that you use internally to organise your content, or one that powers your website, it’s just a case of publishing that data (or at least a subset of it) in a different format. The format we use is called Turtle, where everything is described in the form of triples. The formal specification for the format is here: https://www.w3.org/TR/turtle/. The RES team can provide some support for collection holders contemplating publishing their collections data as linked open data.

What is ‘open data’? There is more to publishing open data than simply publishing the data without any restrictions. Computers need more help in order to ensure they understand that data is open. There are a few different ways in which you can do this. Use a header in the responses from your server, which contains a link pointing to a web address that has the licence you’re using. Include an extra triple statement in the data you publish for each item in your collection, stating that this item has a licence which can be found at the relevant URL.

Licenses There are numerous license you can choose from Examples include Creative Commons, the Open Government License, Open Data Commons The RES Team can provide you with more examples

How do I make the data findable by RES? RES uses a web crawler called Anansi to search around the Web and find linked, open data that might be of interest, with applicable licenses. The easiest way to make sure that your data is findable by Anansi is to use Content Negotiation.

How do I make the data findable by RES? So, rather than putting your data for RES in a completely different place to the rest of your website, you’re better off providing it via the same URLs as your existing pages. After all, HTML and RDF are just different ways of representing the same information – for different audiences.

How do I make the data findable by RES? Once that’s set up, if you want to make sure that RES knows about your data, you can send us a URL that contains links to start crawling from, and we can take it from there.

Data Checklist The data must be openly licensed The data must include a link to the url of a machine-readable licence so products built on RES know the data is available to be used The data should use RES-standard vocabularies for best results (although you are free to use other vocabularies too) The data should also link to the url of a machine readable licence for the asset it describes

How do I make content and assets available to RES? Even though we’ve mainly talked about the data, ultimately we’re interested in making your collections findable and usable by people in education and research all across the UK. To that end, if you can openly license content, so much the better. Regardless of whether the content is openly licensed or not, providing some way for users of applications built on top of RES to access audio and video content can be done in three ways:

How do I make content and assets available to RES? Option 1 If the content is openly licensed, and you are happy with users being able to download or stream the content directly, then all you’ll need to do is provide a link in your data to the media file’s URL. This is the best way to ensure the widest possible take up of your content in any number of applications built on top of RES.

How do I make content and assets available to RES? Option 2 You might prefer to provide a link to the media in an embeddable player. This makes it harder for developers building on top of RES, as they can’t guarantee how the media will integrate with their UX or functionality, but it does give you as the collection holder more control over the experience.

How do I make content and assets available to RES? Option 3 You could use stand-alone playback pages. By using this method, applications built on top of RES can’t embed your content at all – instead users will have to click through from the application to your pages. (This is the least attractive option for product developers, but might be most appropriate if you really can’t allow any form of direct access or embedding. It is, however, good to implement this as a fall-back option if, for some reason, your embedded player or direct media links failed.)

Where can I learn more? There’s a lot more detail on everything mentioned in this guide in our ‘Inside Acropolis’ book, found here: https://bbcarchdev.github.io/inside-acropolis. Specifically of interest would be: Requirements for publishers: https://bbcarchdev.github.io/inside-acropolis/#publishers Publishing digital media: https://bbcarchdev.github.io/inside-acropolis/#media Describing digital assets: https://bbcarchdev.github.io/inside-acropolis/#assets

What happens next The RES team is actively working with technology companies to enable them to build products on top of the RES platform. This willenable your assets to be used by teachers, lecturers and students. We are also working with other parts of the BBC to facilitate the BBC’s partnership ambitions. Meanwhile as it’s an open platform we are also keen to see museums and galleries other heritage organisations using RES to bring in digitised assets from other collections to their digital products.

How can I keep up to date with RES? How can I get in contact with the people behind RES? You can find us: on Twitter: @RES_Project on Tumblr: http://res-project.tumblr.com/

Thank You http://res.space RESFeedback@bbc.co.uk @RES_Project