The DwB Resource Discovery Portal
The purpose of the DwB Resource Discovery Portal (DwB-RDP), is to provide mechanisms to researchers and applications to search and retrieve metadata for the catalogued datasets. It currently allows search at the study level. The portal user interface consists of three separate views, the discovery portal home page, the search results page, and the study details page.
The DwB-RDP is built on a metadata model starting from DDI as a representation of community best practices and standards in metadata development. To harvest and register information into the portal repository, both development lines of the DDI (Codebook and Lifecycle) are identified as core specifications.
The DwB-RDP is composed of the following parts:
- A Harvesting Framework (facilitates the retrieval and ingestion of metadata)
- An Administrator Dashboard (configures and moitors the infratructure and orchestrates the tasks)
- A Provider Portal (enables participating agencies to gain insights on their information present in the system)
- A storage Framework (database where the information is hosted and indexed)
- Discovery Services (exposes the platform and information to the outside world and enables integration in applications or web sites)
In order to register a resource with the portal, a minimal amount of metadata is required to provide a high level summary and to enable proper indexing (for accurate search and retrieval). The minimal set contains:
- Title: the resource name, to display in search result and for text search
- Abstract: A minimum level abstract is needed, to give a description of the content of the data collection.
- Geography: the spatial coverage of the resource underlying data (this is a fundamental search criterium). The minimal requirement is to provide a country.
- Time: the time period the resource underlying data covers (at least a year).
- Location: a url where the user can be redirected to retrieve or find additional information around gaining access to the resource.
Organisations that provide metadata to the portal will get access to the portal's provider services. The Provider Portal gives access to the organization's portion of the harvested/indexed metadata holdings, and to a set of tools to help test and improve quality and consistency of the metadata, as well as re-indexing.
» Enter the demonstration version of the Discovery Portal.
» Download a fact sheet about the Discovery Portal.
» Go to the DwB Deliverables to read the background reports (D8.1–D8.4 and D12.5–D12.7).