WattNames
a JISC VRERI Project

 

WattNames

The aim of the WattNames project is to trial an institutional identity resolver based on URIs to enable the production of reliable and unambiguous identification of researchers from Heriot-Watt University. The URIs will be public and resolve to provide information suitable for a restful API, which will be used to expose researchers' metadata using a range of XML exchange formats including the record format used and recommended by the Names Project. To minimise data protection concerns, the information presented through this interface will not include any data that is not currently accessible through human-facing web interfaces.

Technical Background

The prototype will use URLs to identify researchers at Heriot-Watt, however since a researcher cannot be sent over the Internet, when someone (or some computer) looks up that URL the request will be redirected so that they receive only the information about the person that has been authorised for release on the WWW. Typically the information sent will be the same as is available through the Heriot-Watt people finder, but in a format that is easier for computers to understand. The metadata we require for each researcher comprises his/her first name, surname, academic title, school/department and optionally her/his email address.

The WattNames prototype will be configured to answer URI requests with a HTPP 303 status code and a Location HTTP header that provides the URL of a document that represents the resource. For example, http://www.hw.ac.uk/people/john.smith would be redirected to http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/wattnames /john_smith.html or to http://www.hw.ac.uk/wattnames/john_smith.rdf WattNames uses what is called "Content-negotiation" to decide to return either HTML or a FOAF file containing embedded RDF and set the Content-Location header to the URI where the specific representation can be retrieved. The following image illustrates the "Content-negotiation" involved when WattNames answers URIs requests.