Will’s World is a  JISC Discovery project in which EDINA aims to demonstrate the value and principles of aggregation as a tactic. The concept behind this project is that assembling online data sources relating to one topic will add value and improve the discoverability of these resources; making it easier for developers and service providers to build services and ultimately providing an easier access for all to the data itself and enriched content based on it.

Will’s World is an example of the aggregation as a tactic approach applied to the world of William Shakespeare. EDINA will design, build and populate a Shakespeare Registry of metadata of digital resources relating to Shakespeare covering anything from its work and live to modern performance, interpretation or geographical and historical contextual information. Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) will be provided to allow efficient machine to machine interaction with the registry. APIs will allow the owners of digital content on Shakespeare to advertise their resources by registering and depositing their metadata and the details of the APIs to their data. APIs will enable the developers to work and access content from various sources more easily and efficiently.

Will’s World will demonstrate the value of metadata enhancement through the creation of a showcase application using the aggregated data available in the registry. Additional tools such as text mining or geo tagging will be used to enhance the data and bring various data formats together.

Will’s world will document and disseminate the process of building this prototype registry to allow other to use and benefits from our findings in order to build similar registries centred around other topics.