ADS Steps into the Heritage Gateway
Cat Cload
Heritage Gateway Project Manager
The Heritage Gateway website provides a single point of access to live querying of national and local historic environment data from across England. It is one of a portfolio of projects being developed by English Heritage (EH) via the National Monuments Record (NMR) Access Programme. The website is being developed through a five-year phased project, in collaboration with the Association of Local Government Archaeological Officers (ALGAO) and the Institute for Historic Building Conservation (IHBC). The ADS has been involved with the project from its initiation and is represented on the Heritage Gateway Advisory Committee.
Now entering its third development year, the cross-searching Heritage Gateway has recently gone live. The ADS has been working with EH to ensure that its Excavation Index, currently deposited with ArchSearch, is among the first tranche of datasets to be searchable via the Heritage Gateway, alongside the NMR's Viewfinder, PastScape and Images of England datasets, as well as Cambridgeshire and Essex Historic Environment Records. The system architecture of the Heritage Gateway's cross-searching mechanism is based on web services. In order for remote querying of the Excavation Index in ArchSearch to be possible, the ADS has developed a web service that can translate a query sent to it into a message which ArchSearch can interpret, as well as reformatting the results of that query for the Heritage Gateway. The web service has been configured to interoperate with both Java and .net web platforms and represents a step forward in both EH's and ADS's understanding and application of remote web querying techniques.
Why experiment with web service technology rather than tried and trusted OAI harvesting techniques? Web services have the advantage that they allow an infinitely scalable number of datasets to be remotely queried by the Heritage Gateway - there is no server capacity limitation to consider. In fact, being held on remote servers increases the likelihood of perpetual service, since any single dataset's server being non-operational will not impede other datasets returning results successfully. Once the cause of many a thumb-twiddling interlude, remote querying has come on leaps and bounds as technology and connection speeds improve. Remote querying also has the advantage that where a dataset is being constantly updated in its home location, the Heritage Gateway is able to serve up live results thus obviating data redundancy issues.
The Heritage Gateway is poised to play a crucial role in the delivery of the Government's White Paper, 'Heritage Protection for the 21st Century'. It has been designed with the flexibility to provide a public dissemination route for registers of nationally designated and locally significant historic sites and buildings. The Heritage Gateway's project development period concludes in 2010, designed to coincide with the proposed Legislation date. It is anticipated that the next couple of years of development will see increasing numbers of local historic environment datasets linked into the search mechanism, as well as any necessary enhancements to the search functionality performed in line with the implementation of Heritage Protection Reform. In addition to the EH datasets that are currently available, other new online resources that are created through the NMR Access Programme can also be added to and cross-searched via the Heritage Gateway as and when they become available.
Heritage Gateway
http://www.heritagegateway.org.uk/Gateway/
