Introducing a Social Backbone to Support Access to Digital Resources

Abstract

Abstract. Social media technologies offer potential benefits for a variety of scenarios to support access to digital resources. The involvement of users that do not only consume, but also participate and contribute information, allows for promising approaches such as social browsing and crowdsourcing. Yet, a lot of resources and metadata are contained in distributed and heterogeneous repositories that follow a traditional top-down approach in which only experts can contribute information. A social hub that can aggregate such information, while at the same time offering social media technologies, enables new ways to search and browse these contents, and to maintain underlying structures. We will present how the ALOE system that realises such a social backbone was integrated into the MACE portal. First evaluation results provide evidence about the usefulness of the presented approach.

Aggregating metadata to improve access to resources

“…On the other hand, a Web Service API is offered that allows accessing the ALOE functionalities. Therefore, SOAP was chosen as a standard and platformindependent, XML-based protocol ALOE is used in a variety of different scenarios and projects, see [11] or [12] for more information. The ALOE SOAP API is accessed by the MACE portal and the MACE user management for the following main functionalities: a) User management and authentication: Basic user profile data is stored centrally in a database at Fraunhofer FIT and made accessible within the MACE infrastructure through a Web Service.…”