Making IT Happen: proving the common information environment

The Common Information Environment Demonstrator project (aka the CIE Demonstrator) was a collaborative project between the ADS and Adiuri Systems.  The project was initiated by the CIE working party through Dr Paul Miller, CIE director and was intended as an extension and combination of two earlier demonstrator projects which the partners had completed in 2003. The vision for the project was to build a robust, engaging and technically sophisticated online demonstrator that permitted browsing and searching with cultural heritage data.  The demonstrator combines cross searching of discrete, remote data sets using a new generation of classification tools. The data sets in question are cognate though not explicitly linked and therefore the demonstrator enables users to find and make intellectual links between the data sets.  At the core of this linking is a move from cross searching to cross browsing.  Geography was identified as a readily-understood way to cross reference data, though it was also recognised that this introduced a need for software development and data cleaning, the latter coming through use of the geoXwalk gazetteer. The project laid the foundations for many later portal approaches including ArchSearch and ARIADNE