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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Lee Dirks <ldirks -- microsoft.com>
Date: Wed, May 20, 2009 at 11:51 AM
Subject: Microsoft Research announces Zentity -- a semantic research
output repository platform
To: JISC-REPOSITORIES_at_jiscmail.ac.uk
(apologies for cross-postings)
As part of the Open Repositories Conference currently being held at
Atlanta?s Georgia Institute of Technology, Tony Hey, corporate vice
president of Microsoft Research?s External Research group, is today
announcing the public availability of downloads of a pair of tools,
Zentity and the second version of the Article Authoring Add-in for
Word 2007, part of Microsoft Research?s ongoing efforts to enhance
the scholarly-communication tools life cycle, as originally announced
in 2008. These free downloads are the latest in a regular drumbeat
of releases from the Scholarly Communications team within Hey?s
group.
MSR?s Zentity is a research-output repository platform that provides
the necessary building blocks, tools, and services for developers who
are tasked with creating and maintaining an organization?s repository
ecosystem. Furthermore, it provides an easy-to-install and maintain
experience for those who want to quickly set up a research-output
repository for their project, team, or organization. The platform is
based on Microsoft?s technologies (SQL Server 2008 and .NET Framework
version 3.5 SP1) hence taking advantage of their robustness, their
quality support infrastructure, and the plethora of developer-focused
tools and documentation. New applications on top of the platform can
be developed using any .NET language and the Visual Studio 2008 SP1
environment. The platform focuses on the management of academic
assets?such as people, books/papers, lectures, presentations, videos,
workflows, datasets, and tags ? as well as the semantic relationships
between them. In this latest release, developers can declaratively
(or at runtime) easily introduce their own asset and relationship
types. Support for various formats and services such as full-text
search, OAI-PMH, RSS and Atom Syndication, BibTeX import and export,
SWORD, AtomPub, RDFS, and OAI-ORE are included as part of the
distribution.
Dale Heenan, Web project manager at the United Kingdom?s Economic and
Social Research Council (ESRC), has had an opportunity to implement
an early version of Zentity, a research-output repository platform
that enables researchers to store, archive, and preserve their work
more efficiently, as a pilot to investigate ways to improve and
extend the organization?s Social Sciences Repository. ?We have been
impressed with Zentity?s flexibility and ease of use,? Heenan says.
?Our pilot project has demonstrated that this innovative software
could form the basis of a new ESRC Social Sciences Repository which
would better meet the needs of the organization and our users. This
is a promising solution from Microsoft, and we look forward to
implementing Zentity version 1.0 over the coming months.?
Microsoft External Research strongly supports the process of research
and its role in the innovation ecosystem, including developing and
supporting efforts in open access, open tools, open technology, and
interoperability. We partner with universities, national libraries,
publishers, and governmental organizations to help develop tools and
services to evolve the scholarly information lifecycle. These
projects demonstrate our ongoing work towards producing
next-generation documents that increase productivity and empower
authors to increase the discoverability and appropriate re-use of
their work. More information on each of these tools can be found at:
http://www.microsoft.com/scholarlycomm.
Please don?t hesitate to email scholar_at_microsoft.com with any
questions.
Received on Wed May 20 2009 - 17:25:52 BST