Mission statement
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Objective
NAME will create a Europe-wide network of research communities, by developing a new generation of intelligent, co-operating services for the collective creation, enrichment, and sharing of digital content by scholars everywhere.
What we are going to do
NAME is built upon a unique consortium, including libraries, scholars, and research institutions and technology partners. NAME Library partners range from the largest research libraries (The European Library, CERL, LIBER, CENL) to small independent institutions. Scholarly partners include centres representing multiple projects (the Huygens Institute and Kings College London) and small groups working in isolation. Technology partners include a university supercomputing centre, commercial companies, and teams working in research institutes and libraries. The partners have a common set of problems: how to create and enhance digital resources in a sustainable, open and efficient matter. The partners have identified a distributed computing infrastructure offering intelligent services and based on 'smart data', as a solution to these problems. This project seeks investment to implement this infrastructure and its innovative IT principles. By identifying specific use cases, developed from engagement with scholars in the consortium and beyond, NAME will build a set of useful and usable services. Research groups will shape themselves organically around the shared services and shared content.
How we are going to do it
The partners have already identified fundamental services required by the research communities, based on common use cases. Application workshops engaging a wide range of scholars will extend and refine the fundamental specifications and requirements for the services, the data they operate on and the metadata needed to enable them. These will be modelled into development processes for the creation of lightweight services operating and interacting over a light weight protocol by the technical teams. Further workshops and public release will refine the services iteratively. A distributed infrastructure will enable both the refinement of the services and the addition of new services; the lightweight nature of the implementation-agnostic services themselves and their distribution across multiple environments will sustain them.
Who we are aiming at; impact
Researchers have always been united by shared interests, but divided by time and space. Through the services NAME will provide (for annotation, linking, comparison, and more) scholars may readily enhance what others have done and add new resources, which others may enhance in turn. Our goal is that anyone who has something valuable to contribute to the digital record of our heritage, from established scholars and institutions through to the community at large, should be able to do so. The future internet will be made by all who use it: to be secure and trustworthy, it must be based on high-quality data, accessed and enhanced through intelligent services.