As Assistant Director for Research and Develoment at UKOLN I am responsible for the strategic direction of our research, and for seeking funding to support that research. I lead the Research and Development team and co-ordinate UKOLN's contribution to a number of externally funded projects.
The R&D team have pursued a number of coherent themes within their project work over the last few years: the development and use of emerging metadata standards, Web based resource discovery, digital preservation and the management of metadata schemas.
Projects in which the R&D team are currently involved include: the Open Archives Forum, the Subject Portals Project, ARCO, IMesh Toolkit, JISC Information Environment Service Registry, ePrintsUK, FAIR PORTAL, HILT, JISC/Wellcome Web Archiving study, Digital Preservation Coalition.
I have a particular interest in the structured expression of metadata element sets in schema languages. I am enthusiastic about the potential of the Semantic Web, and believe the sharing of schemas and ontologies will be a first step towards achieving the required infrastructure. Within recent research I have been involved with colleagues in demonstrating the role of metadata schema registries, and taking forward a data model for the combination of metadata schemas in application profiles. This work also looks towards the collaborative creation of metadata (metadata sharing). At present I am working on the MEG Registry project and CORES project.
I am co-chair of the DC-Registry Working Group, with Harry Wagner from OCLC, and I am a member of the DC Advisory Board.
Here are lists of my presentations and publications.