Shared Infrastructure « Project Bamboo

Overview

The BTP is establishing shared infrastructure, in the form of web services, interoperable collections, and organizational partnerships to meet the technology needs of humanities researchers and institutions.

Interoperability

Project Bamboo’s shared infrastructure will support collections interoperability to enable scholars to locate and work with collections and content dispersed across multiple repositories, and which have been digitized using multiple mark-up and metadata models. The Collections Interoperability (CI) group has identified initial collections of great interest to scholars—including the HathiTrust repository, sections of the Perseus Digital Library, and 400 years of English texts from the TCP. The CI group is collaborating with other Bamboo working groups and external experts to identify the most appropriate standards to implement for both content access and structural interoperability.

Shared Web Services

Web services deployed by Bamboo will support two core goals.

First, to serve analytical, integration, and transformation functions for use in specific applications, we will refactor key capabilities of existing software for exposure through web services interfaces. This will enable integration with applications and environments that can “speak” RESTful web service protocols or consume and serve Atom feeds.

Second, identity services to enable users to form communities of interest with shared access to content, research results, and communication mechanisms. These capabilities will be available to any environment chosen for performing research that supports RESTful web service protocols.

Promoting Tool Interoperability

The Bamboo Services Platform (BSP) mediates the interactions among independent tools, research environments and content repositories in order to support research requiring multiple tools and content sources. The Morphology and Syntactic Annotation services deployed by Tufts University are currently running on the BSP in an "alpha" stage of development.

Facilitating Research Across Collections

Bamboo's Content Interoperability (CI) Hub automates content access and standardizes format differences among repositories including TCP-EEBO/ECCO, HathiTrust, Perseus Digital Library and AustLit. Through the creation and implementation of metadata standards, we aim to facilitate research across collections and institutions.

Managing Groups and Identity

The Bamboo Person Service links scholars’ various identities (e.g. university and scholarly society) to enable access to authorized resources with a single log-on. This service also aids group collaboration across institutions.