The essence of taking part in the Web Observatory is three-fold:
- Describe some/all of your web datasets, projects, and/or tools in metadata
- Maintain a service to notify other systems/crawlers of the metadata
- Participate in ongoing discussions to continue to advance the scope and quality of the Web Observatory eco-system
The sharing can be done in a number of ways:
- Share datasets indirectly with other Web Observatories
- Download/install existing Web Observatory software
- Extended your existing system to add Observatory features
Share datasets with other Web Observatories
Sharing an existing dataset is easy using the recently accepted schema.org extension in which a small amount of markup is added to the pages containing links to the datasets you are sharing allowing standard search engines to discover them. Alternatively you can list your dataset on our portal (you must create an account to do this).
Click here and also here to find out more about the schema.org WO extension
Download/install existing WO software
Members of the Web Science Trust network of Labs (WSTnet) will be offering a number of open source Web Observatory platforms and tool for download. The first available Web Observatory system is available from University of Southampton so please click here to register your name/contact details to be contacted about a Web Observatory installation for your organisation.
Extended your existing system to add Observatory features
We anticipate that some organisations will want to integrate their existing system to publish and consume data from the Web Observatory eco-system. WST will be publishing papers and technical guidance over the coming months. Please click here to register your name/contact details to be contacted about a Web Observatory integration for your organisation.
We look forward to welcoming you to this exciting project.