ENSEMBLE

The Ensemble Project’s Fedora Repository and associated Mulgara Semantic Triplestore had their first public outing at a lunchtime seminar for staff at the UK Data Archive, University of Essex.  Patrick Carmichael, and Louise Corti presented an overview of the project and Agustina Martinez Garcia demonstrated how an appropriately constructed digital repository could serve both data and metadata to web applications.

Agustina showed how large data sets could be accessed, ‘rules’ applied and the results could then be presented using the visualisation tools developed by the SIMILE project at MIT.

The illustration shows how data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) can be viewed using the SIMILE ‘Exhibit’ Tool and its Google Map element. Users can select observations of plants and use these as the starting points of further investigations, queries and hypothesis formulation.

Patrick Carmichael, Ensemble Project Director, explained: “these developments  mark an important move forward for the project: they enable us to deal with much larger data sets then previously, which will allow teachers and learners to engage with real data rather than small exemplary collections.  Supporting this kind of authentic learning is an important component of the case based approaches we are finding in the research settings in which we are working.”