Institutional and Collective Benefits describes who, at an institutional level, is engaged with the CHALICE project. We have three work packages split across four institutions – the Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis at Queens University Belfast; the Language Technology Group at the School of Informatics, and the EDINA National Datacentre, both at the University of Edinburgh; and the Centre for e-Research at Kings College, London.
The Chalice team page contains more detailed biographical data about the researchers, developers, technicians and project managers involved in putting the project together.
The community engagement aspect of CHALICE will focus on gathering requirements from the academic community on how a linked data gazetteer would be most useful in to historical research projects concerned with different time periods. Semi-structured interviews will be conducted with relevant projects, and the researchers involved will be invited to critically review existing gazetteer services, such as geonames, with a view to identifying how they would could get the most out of such a service. This will apply the same principles, based loosely on the methodology employed by the TEXTvre project. The project will also seek to engage with providers of services and resources. CHALICE will be able to enhance such resources, but also link them together: in particular the project will collaborate with services funded by JISC to gather evidence as to how these services could make use of the gazetteer .  A rapid analysis of the information gathered will be prepared, and a report published within six months of the project’s start date.
When a first iteration of the system is available, we will revisit these projects, and  develop brief case studies that illustrate practical instances of how the resource can be used.
The evidence base thus produced will substantially inform design of the user interface and the scoping and implementation of its functionalities.
Gathering this information will be the responsibility of project staff at CeRch.
We would love to be more specific about exactly which archive projects will yield to CHALICE at this point; but a lot will depend both on the spatial focus of the gazetteer, and the investigation and outreach during the course of the project. So we have a half dozen candidates in mind right now, but the detailed conversations and investigations will have to wait some months… see the next post on the project plan describing when and how things will happen.