The Gateway to Research (GtR) project organised its first hack days to test their APIs. The two-days event was hosted by Aston University in Birmingham and convened about 20 invited people with backgrounds in system development. A documentation has been published beforehand explaining in detail the GtR Application Programming Interface V1.0, providing at the time of testing two APIs
- GtR API
- CERIF API
both producing outputs in XML and JSON formats. More APIs will be added and existing APIs will change over time. Future updates will be informed at the GtR web portal. The hack event was considered as a test-drive where further events are being considered later this year. The GtR CERIF XML API received very positive feedback during the two days event.
This post is to inform the wider community about the availability of a CERIF 1.5 Reference Document as a result of a few hours of collaborative work at the hack event by Chris Gutteridge and Brigitte Jörg, automatically transforming and merging existing CERIF model files into a more readable version of CERIF 1.5 descriptions with the aim to serve in particular the community of developers by saving their time with getting in touch with the CERIF model, structure and thus, mission.
The file transformation script developed by Chris Gutteridge is provided without restrictions and thus encourages re-use and adjustments for upcoming CERIF release updates.
Further event results will be reported at the GtR website.
The goal of GtR is to give the public better access to information on research funded by the Research Councils, such as – who, what and where the Councils fund, and the output and outcomes, linking to available open access repositories and/or data catalogues. More information and discussion is available from the below links:
- http://blogs.rcuk.ac.uk/2012/07/26/introducing-the-gateway-to-research/
- http://blogs.rcuk.ac.uk/2013/01/14/gateway-to-research-activities-for-early-2013/
- http://blogs.rcuk.ac.uk/2013/03/07/gateway-to-research-api-documentation/
- http://blogs.rcuk.ac.uk/files/2013/03/GtR-Application-Programming-Interface-V1.0.pdf
- http://www.eurocris.org/Uploads/Web%20pages/CERIF-1.5/cerif.html