Heritage Ireland – Prototyping a Website and Data Platform

Here are some examples of the prototyped pages and features:

CHALLENGES

The plethora of datastores and the lack of central data management governance create significant issues:

1. Disorganised Data: Information collected and held by the Heritage Division is not readily retrievable, even internally, making information sharing very difficult and duplication of effort inevitable.
2. Inefficient Data Collection: Business processes around data collection, management and distribution within the organisations are made inefficient.
3. Labour-Intensive Task: Building a holistic view of a natural or archaeological site,artefacts, species, or habitats becomes a very labour-intensive task.
4. Difficulty Sharing Data: It is increasingly difficult to meet the organisations’ requirements to provide data to external bodies and the general public.
5. Issues Protecting Heritage: The impact could be felt in significant issues, such as the failure to properly protect monuments or designated areas or sites.

The Heritage Division is a knowledge-based organisation which holds a mass of data arising from ongoing operational activities. It produces information based on that data to support its reporting obligations and disseminate certain authoritative information to internal and external stakeholders.

WORK DELIVERED

Derilinx worked closely with a dedicated team including expert representatives from National Parks & Wildlife Services (NPWS) and National Monument Service (NMS) to deliver the following outcomes:

1. A vision for an integrated Data Portal and Data Management Solution – “Providing Heritage’s Stakeholders, internal and external, with the reliable accurate data (datasets and site maps) that they require for their own needs in the most accessible manner and the most efficient way possible”. This vision is broken down into three underlying layers:

• Data publication and cataloguing: This capability enables information to be easily accessible, explorable and retrievable from a one-stop-shop Data Portal/Public Interface that reflect the richness and beauty of Ireland’s Heritage. This portal will also enable access to site maps and two-way communication process with users.
• Underlying Data Management: Data management capability that will ensure that data is catalogued, curated, and shared across the organisation to support an effective decision-making process and address current data inconsistencies/inefficiencies
• Underlying governance: Establish a best practice data governance process that underpins data publication, cataloguing and data management procedures across internal departments / business units

2. A roadmap for the implementation of such vision across key pillars including Data and Systems, Use Cases and Organisational Readiness

3. A prototype of the future solution focused on key prioritised features including mapping and geo-navigation, faceted search, semantic search, data curation workflow.

Target Outcome: Providing Heritage’s Stakeholders, internal and external, with the reliable accurate data (datasets and site maps) that they require for their own needs in the most accessible manner and the most efficient way possible.

FEATURES

Mapping & Geonavigation:

• A one-stop-shop to explore Ireland’s richness in archaeology & biodiversity data both through textual search and location based search.
• A powerful search bar and capabilities to give the user a full range of options and facets to find out the right information. The map view is a feature that enhances the user experience to find relevant heritage data.

Faceted Search At Metadata Level:

• Faceted searches that help dive into relevant data.
• Preview of the data across multiple formats to discover and explore first hand.

Semantic Search: A semantic search capability that helps users discover data using natural language queries.

Data Curation Workflow: A data pipeline builder that provides critical focus on data quality and metadata quality to preserve the value of the data hub.

SOLUTION COMPONENTS

1. A Data Lake Storage component that will provide the required flexible storage capability for the variety of data formats handled within the Heritage’s scope of activities (pictures, videos, maps, structured tabular data, unstructured text, etc).

Unlike data warehouses, data lakes are fed information in its native form which will enable greater—and timelier—stream of data available for access/analysis.

Key Benefits:

• Ability to handle diverse types of data
• Ability to store all types of structured and unstructured data in a data lake, from CRM data to social media posts
• More flexibility—ability to adapt to new data processing requirements
• Ability to store raw data
• Unlimited ways to query the data
• Democratised access to data via a single, unified view of data across the organisation when using an effective data management platform

2. A Data Publication and Data Cataloguing Platform that will enable through metadata cataloguing powerful faceted search, preview, exploration, and overall access to Heritage Data from a one-stop-shop Heritage Data Portal. The Portal will be used as both an internal and external data cataloguing resource, with different profiles of users and roles.

3. Revised standard joint Data Management Framework that will govern the Heritage Data Management Lifecycle:

• Reducing Data Redundancy
• Improving Data Sharing
• Improving Data Integrity and Consistency
• Compliance with key Data Regulation
• Access to best practice Data Back-Up and Recovery

This project helped Heritage Ireland create and ambitious and practical executable vision for the future data hub.

• Enabling those stakeholders to handle, interact and extract insights from a wide range of datasets (formats, size, frequency of update, quality)
• Supporting “best in class” data management processes across a range of data providers and data re-users
• Providing a “one-stop-shop” for data providers and data re-users to both access data insights relating to conservative measure and explore/drill-into/mine underlying data for further data analysis