iAnn project
Introduction
Many organizations aim to keep up to date their members with the latest news and events. This information is provided in the form of announcements to inform the community about meetings, courses, newsletters, reports, seminars, bursaries, workshops, studentships, conferences, symposiums and job offers. Organizations with a common interest dedicate time and effort to collect and make available this information. However the annotation process is not collaborative resulting in an individual decentralized effort that becomes redundant. Insufficient coordination makes the same announcement to be reported by several sources in several formats and collected by several repositories of information. The annotation process requires manual extraction and organization of the information. This is a time consuming process that makes organizations struggle to update and maintain announcements. Protocols to collect announcements are arbitrary as well as the formats to organize the information. This causes a lack of standardization that makes hard the integration of announcements. As an additional issue, there is not a repository to find a comprehensive collection of announcements nor a system to make advance queries and filter information. iAnn is a community project aiming to provide solutions to these problems.
Goals
"Itico Announcements" or iAnn is a project aiming to provide:
- A solution to manage, organize, centralize, standardize and distribute announcements.
- Announcements services tailored to particular communities.
- A system that makes organizations with a common interest to collaborate on the collection and annotation of announcements.
Activity
The project focus its activity on:
- Software and services to annotate and provide announcements.
- Curation and annotations of announcements.
ITICO centralizes services and development of software. Curation is decentralized relying on the expertise of participant organizations. The income produced by the iAnn project is distributed to pay development, curation and administration. Funding coming from iAnn aims to enhance the curation process and achieve a self-sustainable system.
Outcomes
A collaborative announcement system for organizations with a common interest
The system provide two core functionalities, an editor to curate the data, and a query service for using the data.
iAnn Editor
The editor helps organizations during the annotation process. Participant organizations will have administration access to the system (the system also provide limited access to accept input from third party users). The system helps organizations to submit non-redundant announcements by analyzing titles and dates, classifying announcements using a predefine control vocabulary and providing reports to the administrators including internal statistics.iAnn Query Service
The query service helps organizations to search for announcements in the system. Organization are be able to query and filter relevant announcements and include them automatically in their particular websites. This service consists on a web service accepting different query parameters and providing results in a standard XML format (RSS). RSS is a format easy to integrate in websites and in popular web tools like Content Management Systems, Blogs, etc. Webmasters of different organizations are be able to include distinct announcements in their websites using predefined queries with specific parameters (ie: location, date, type of announcement, categories, etc). Organization do not have to worry any more about maintaining the announcement sections. The system provide up to date information and websites can automatically get the latest announcements from iAnn collaborative announcement system.
iAnn Viewer
The iAnn project develops and provides a variety of web tools to query and visualize the collaborative announcement system. Among this tools we offer calendars to display announcements, maps to display the location of the meetings, search tools to looks for specific announcements, custom templates to display announcements, and internal statistics about the collaborative curation process. iAnn provides these tool for free to participant organizations.
Service support
iAnn provides support to the participant organizations. This support consists on personal help of how to use the collaborative announcement system.
