Repository66.org Map Blog

It appears that the repository map mashup site is attracting plenty of blogging activity (always a good sign!).

1. First up - the well-known Open Access News Blog by Peter Suber. The entry talks about the new OpenDOAR API and how this could be used to create mashups and goes on to say “The most exciting example to date is the mash-up of OpenDOAR and Google Maps from Repository66“. See the full blog post: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_03_18…
2. Next up is Richard Jones’ blog post Repository 66 and the Google Map Adventure
3. Another post comes from the EPrints team at Southampton University: http://trac.eprints.org/projects/iar/wiki/Export
4. Charles W. Bailey, Jr. in his much-read DigitalKoans blog writes about the maps: Repository 66: OA Digital Repository Map Mashup
5. David Prosser from SPARC Europe has written about the maps in the site’s “What’s New” section.
6. The pintini blog has a French entry about the maps entitled Sur la routes des DI.
7. A Japanese language blog points to the maps: http://b.hatena.ne.jp/entry/http://maps.repository66.org/
8. Finally, plenty of traffic is coming via del.icio.us where it was first tagged by JISC’s Amber Thomas (thanks Amber!) and now by others. See: http://del.icio.us/url/a09… for details.

Just in case you wondered, the data was collected by Google’s Web Analytics system - another great service from Google!

Today the repository map mashup site went global!

So far all data has been restricted to the UK. The repository data has come from two sources - ROAR and OpenDOAR. However neither of these data providers (until recently) provided any geographical data. OpenDOAR stores postal addresses, however these need to be converted into good old fashioned longitudes and latitudes. So the data for the UK is mostly hand-crafted.

In an attempt to improve on the amount of geographical data, Tim Brody from Southampton used http://www.hostip.info/ to generate location information for the IP addresses of many of the repositories. The maps have now harvested this data from ROAR allowing it to show more than 300 repositories.

(Tim Brody has also now used this data to create Google Earth files (see his blog for details) as originally blogged by Richard Jones ‘Repository 66 and the Google Map Adventure ‘).

Stage 2…? An interface to allow users to upload either corrected or new geographical data for their repository.

Stage 3…? Use some geocoding software to convert postal addresses from OpenDOAR into geographical location data.

Caveat - there are a few wrinkles in the system. For example if one institution hosts several servers, due to the programmatic fashion by which the locations are generated, the coordinates of the repositories will be identical. The code powering the maps just needs to offset each of them slightly. As it happens, the Google Earth version of the data is identical, but Google Earth shows one item, but with multiple lines coming out of it each ending in an icon for the repository - neat!

OpenDOAR the Directory of Open Access Repositories (an Open Access repository directory where each repository has been visited by OpenDOAR staff to check the quality of the information) has recently published a draft API. This allows access to their data via HTTP GET requests which return XML records of repositories.

The repository map mashup site now makes use of the API to enable it to show the prose description of each repository taken from OpenDOAR. This is displayed via a new tab in the information window of each repository.

The API also gives access to the postal address of the institution hosting each repository - hopefully this will come in useful. It could, in theory, be put into a geocoding (address interpolation) system, to get map co-ordinates for more repositories worldwide.

This blog will document the development of the repository mashup map http://maps.repository66.org/

The map is created using a mashup of data from ROAR (the Registry of Open Access Repositories) which collects statistics on the growth and content of open access repositories over time, and OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) which provides a human-analysed description of open access repositories. The data from these sites are overlayed onto Google maps to show the distribution of repositories, their type and when they were launched.

At present the map shows repositories in the UK, however it is planned that this will grow to cover Europe, and then the world. Please send any suggestions for new functionality, bug reports, or complaints about your local plumber, to stuart.lewis@aber.ac.uk or leave a comment on this blog entry.