Submitting content to TRID, the TRIS and ITRD database. VTI s experience

Transcription

1 Submitting content to TRID, the TRIS and ITRD database. VTI s experience Birgitta Sandstedt, Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute (VTI)

2 Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute (VTI) VTI is a national research institute under the Ministry of Industry, Employment and Communications and has a broad competence profile and carries out applied research and development in relation to all modes of transportation. Research areas: Pavement technology Infrastructure maintenance Vehicle technology People in the transport system Traffic safety Traffic analyses Environment Regional and urban transport planning and decision-making processes Transport systems Transport economics.

3 VTI Library and Information Centre (BIC) Swedish information supply centre in the transportation and traffic sector on commission by the Swedish Government Swedish centre in international cooperation within the transportation research information area Swedish ITRD centre since start (1972) Developed and runs Transguide, the Swedish portal for transportation research

4 Why input to TRID, the TRIS and ITRD database? Exposure of Swedish transport research. Many users from many different countries Supply Swedish researchers with information and knowledge from other countries Cooperation with other member countries and organisations. Annual meetings at the OECD (ITRD members) Top notch functions and interface Information professionals structure and mark-up the information for efficient retrieval using quadrilingual ITRD thesaurus and Transportation Research Thesaurus. Selection made from reliable sources by information professionals Sustainability Free of charge for the users

5 How have we submitted content over the years? Typed in the information and sent the sheets by mail Input program created a file in CF6 format (cut and paste from our in-house database) Information sharing started with TRB using export and import in xml. Program was developed to convert records from our library catalogue in the portal Transguide to TRIS format and reverse Next step to take was to develop a program which converts records from our library catalogue to TRID in xml format

6 What do we want to achieve? We want to submit relevant Swedish records to TRID by exporting a file from our library catalogue database without having to add anything or changing the information we once have stored.

7 What have we done? Compared the TRID fields and their content with the fields and content in our library catalogue database Changed our database structure to make it more compatible with TRID, mainly separating information which has been stored in one field and adding new fields. All as much as possible in accordance with MARC. Some minor changes in our cataloguing rules Search terms in English from the ITRD thesaurus were already used but the codes are now added automatically

8 Challenges Converting between different languages might cause problems. However when creating XML output the best approach is to use the right character encoding in the header information. For Swedish encoding ISO seems to be best but UTF-8 should also work. What is equally important is to use the XML entities instead of &, <, >, '," because these are used by XML itself. A good practice is to follow the directives from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which can be found at It is valuable to have a direct contact with the ones responsible for submitting the data into the remote database, at least in the beginning. Problems is much easier and faster to resolve this way. This of course requires IT-competence at our end. From start a two-way conversion was considered which resulted in a first program approach that became quite abstract and complex. Now a more straight-forward one-way design is being used which is more easy to maintain. If we change anything in our database design we have to check if anything needs to be changed in the conversion program.

9 Have we succeeded? Yes we have! We will now be able to submit an increasingly number of published Swedish transportation research records to TRID in an efficient way without duplication of work. Next step to take is to convert records from our national transportation research catalogue which was launched in the Transguide portal just before summer.

10 Contact information..