Metadata

DESIRE: Development of a European Service for Information on Research and Education

DESIRE D3.2: Quality Ratings Implementation

The work described here has been undertaken by UKOLN as part of deliverable D3.2 of phase two of the DESIRE project. This work folows on from an earlier DESIRE activity: D3.1 Quality Ratings in RDF [D3.1]

Supported Scenarios

The main supported scenario is the ranking of ROADS search results based on quality ratings from a third party ratings bureau (which in the demonstrator is a further ROADS database). Ratings may be obtained either via WHOIS++ or via HTTP using an RDF/XML format.

A secondary scenario demonstrates a further use of a ratings bureau (again a ROADS database in the demonstrator) to provide quality ratings of resources that are linked to from a currently viewed page.

ROADS as a Ratings Bureau

Retrieving metadata associated with a particular URI is not possible in the standard ROADS distribution due to various technical details. It is required to support scenarios where a ROADS database acts as a ratings bureau. An extended version of ROADS that provides access to metadata by URI was required by a separate UKOLN/ROADS project, this is described in [ROADSURI]. It is likely that this functionality will be incorporated into a future version of ROADS.

In order to support non-ROADS ratings bureaux, the ranking engine is able to request ratings over HTTP and accept RDF/XML formatted results. A simple gateway to add such behaviour to an existing ROADS database had also been developed in a separate UKOLN/ROADS project, as described in [GATEWAY]. Note that this does not provide a general RDF/WHOIS++ gateway and that the generated RDF/XML describes a single resource and does not constitute a full WHOIS++ response.

Quality-Based Ranking within ROADS

The standard ROADS distribution uses a simple ranking algorithm based on the frequency with which the search terms appear in the record describing each resource.

This work extends ROADS to support ranking based on quality criteria. A number of approaches for obtaining quality criteria are examined including storing quality attributes along with resource discovery attributes in ROADS templates and retrieving ratings dynamically from a ratings bureau (which may or may not be another ROADS database).

For full details and a demonstrator see Quality Based Ranking within ROADS.

Link Rater

Users viewing material on the Web do not currently have access to structured information regarding the quality of either the resource they are currently viewing or the resources that are linked to from the current page.

We describe a mechanism for accessing and displaying quality information from a remote ratings bureau while viewing existing resources. The existing resources require no modification.

See Link Rater for further details and a demonstrator.

References

[D3.1] - DESIRE D3.1: Quality Ratings in RDF - http://www.desire.org/html/research/deliverables/D3.1/
[ROADSURI] - Extending ROADS to Support Retrieval by URI - http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/roads/metadata-mgmt/fetchbyuri.html
[GATEWAY] - ROADS for Web Site Metadata Management - http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/roads/metadata-mgmt/mdmgmt.html

Maintained by: Tracy Gardner of UKOLN, the UK Office for Library and Information Networking, University of Bath.
Document created: 19-Apr-1999.
Last updated: 15-Jun-1999.
Links updated: 08-Jan-2013.

[Metadata] [UKOLN]