Joining SWED

This page explains how to add your organisation or project to the SWED Web site. As you may know SWED is different to other directories. It aims to be more sustainable, robust and make the directory information more reusable. To do this it uses a different approach to other directories.

Organisations and projects themselves, host (store) their information on their own web sites - or that of a proxy organisation/project. SWED simply 'harvests' that data and uses a copy (that is regularly updated) of it to create the SWED web site - to find out more about this approach read our 'semantic portals' web page. If you would like to know more about becoming involved, visit our 'swed involvement' page.

Adding your organisation or project to SWED takes 4 simple steps.

		Stage 0 Preparation. As with any organisational or project directory data entry form (on paper or electronic), it helps to have collected the necessary information before you begin filling in the form. We suggest that you visit the SWED data creation web form and note down any pieces of information that you will need to locate before you sit down to complete the form.
NB: only the 'organisation/project name' and 'discription' are mandatory. You can make an initial entry by adding information immediately to hand and update it later (see updating information below)

		Stage 1 Complete the SWED data creation web form. When the information is submitted, SWED will send you an e-mail. The mail contains a link to a file (RDF file) that contains your data, a copyright statement giving permission for the information to be re-used (see our FAQ page for details), and instructions of what to do with the file.

		Stage 2 When the e-mail is received it needs to be forwarded to someone who is responsible for uploading files to your web site - or that of the proxy organisation that has agreed to host the file for you. This person uploads (publishes) the file to a location on the web server (computer that 'serves' the web pages)

		Stage 3 The person that uploaded the file, can now tell SWED where the file is. They do this by registering the location of the file with SWED using the registration page. SWED then 'reads' or harvests that file and adds the information to the directory.

		Updating Information To update an information file you can visit SWED's Information Review/Update page. There you can load the old information into the web form and edit it and repeat step 2. You do not need to repeat stage 3 unless you change the name of the file or its location. Alternatively if you have some technical expertise it is possible to edit the existing file directly directly. The information will be updated on SWED when it next harvests the updated file.

If you would like more information about the SWED project visit our contacts page to find out who to contact for your particular inquiry.