Summary

The Semantic Web Environment Directory (SWED) Project is part of a European Union Funded project called SWAD-Europe (Semantic Web Advanced Development). It is based at Hewlett Packard Labs in Bristol and the ILRT (Institute for Learning and Research Technology) at the University of Bristol, in the UK.

It is a proof of concept demonstration, aiming to create a sustainable and scalable web-based system for building and maintaining Community Information Resources (portals). The system will overcome many of the limitations and problems with more traditional and current approaches - see project requirements specification.

The focus of the demonstration is to create a directory of UK based environmental organisations. The SWED team are working closely with the The Environment Council and other environmental, natural history and community organisations, to help ensure that the directory will meet the needs of the wider environment related community in the UK.

The key outputs of the project are:

• a fully working prototype directory web site (http://www.swed.org.uk)
• downloadable software (see technical resources pages) that will allow others to build their own directory pages, portals or other information resources
• Reports detailing the system and the lessons learnt during development.

All data and software are being developed using non-proprietary open technical standards.

Key goals of the project include:

• improved sustainability
• ease of maintenance
• enabling easy reuse of information

These goals are made possible by using a Semantic Web based approach. This approach means that the directory member organisations publish, own and control their own information. This information is then harvested and collated by SWED who produce a directory Web site.

Essentially the SWED directory provides a view of the data, that is brought together from across the Web. This 'self publishing' or data harvesting approach means that others can also harvest and collate the information and provide different views (e.g. a specialist directory containing only a small subset of the organisations) and enrich the information by adding their own additional information (e.g. what specialist services or resources organisations provide).

On the Web site, the richness of the indexing of the information will mean that it will be much easier than traditional directories to browse and search, to find relevant organisations.

While SWED is a research project we are working with a number of national and local environmental organisations to develop an exit strategy that will help ensure that the system is used and maintained once the project ends.