Open Wide: Using Open Standards in Academic Web Services

Despite enormous strides recently, it remains difficult for researchers to find relevant resources that are not 'flat' html files and may be hidden within web services. This paper will draw upon recent experiences at the UK's largest academic data centre providing web services to the education community. Since May 2001 a project has been underway attempting to make the resources more visible by exploiting a number of relevant open standards and initiatives to ensure interoperability, Descriptions. The aim of the project being to increase the visibility and accessibility of 'appropriate' resources. This principally requires focusing on machine-to-machine metadata interchange. This paper documents some of the realities faced when implementing these potentially valuable, though sometimes 'over-hyped' technologies.