Sharing Equipment Data
The EPSRC-funded equipment.data site is RCUK‘s preferred medium for the national sharing of data regarding research equipment – and now it includes information about equipment at the University of St Andrews. In collaboration with the Research Policy Office and using data supplied by the Finance office, the Research Computing team has published the data on the University website in such a way that it is automatically picked up and aggregated by equipment.data.
There are actually two elements required to make the data discoverable in this way. The first is an Organisation Profile Document (OPD), which is a linked data description of the University, published as Turtle-formatted RDF. The term “linked data” refers to a method of publishing structured data in a way that can be easily read by computers and which facilitates the connecting and querying of data from multiple, separate sources. In this case, our OPD (you may need to “View Source” in your browser to see all the detail) describes the University itself, its physical location, contact details, social media accounts, key pages on the University website and the University’s repository of research outputs. It also points to the equipment data, made available in an appropriately-formatted CSV file. At this point in time the equipment is described with a minimal amount of information for each item, but in combination with the OPD it is sufficient to attain gold compliance status on the equipment.data site. The OPD is linked to in the head of the university homepage, so that it and the equipment data it points to are automatically picked up by equipment.data.
If you have any queries about the OPD or the equipment data, please get in touch via [email protected]. The documents can also be viewed on GitHub.