Access Innovations, Inc. is pleased to announce the completion of the Civil Engineering Database (CEDB) for the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).
ASCE contracted Access Innovations in 2014 to begin transforming their corpus of civil engineering records from their existing relational database into an XML database. To do this, Access Innovations ingested nearly 250,000 records using XIS֬™, one module of their Data Harmony Suite of software products, turning the 142 fields present in the original relational database into 216 XML tags for the new CEDB. These records represent 49 document types, such as journals or books, and 14 separate authority files, keeping the bibliographic information consistent across ASCE’s corpus.
Once the transfer was complete, Access Innovations used the MAI module of the Data Harmony Suite to index the corpus against three thesauri: one for technical civil engineering topics, one for geographic locations, and one for author specialties, which is used to match authors with their subject areas. Once the content was indexed, Access Innovations worked closely with ASCE to refine the XML database while building a new website front end for dynamic search and retrieval. In the CEDB, users now have access to new search features such as type-ahead subject headings, dynamic results filtering for document types, and direct link to ASCE Library when full-text publications are available.
Bruce Gossett, Managing Director, ASCE Publications, commented, “Access Innovations was a valued partner in the successful migration of our CEDB to an XML-based platform. The new CEDB facilitates search and discoverability, permits data exchanges with other partners and platforms, and makes full use of our proprietary taxonomy.”
“We are extremely excited to be part of the launch of the new CEDB search front end,” remarks Win Hansen, director of production for Access Innovations. “We have worked quite closely with ASCE to successfully migrate their highly complex data to a format that works well for their users. We’re very pleased with how well it works; this is a powerful tool.”
The CEDB is powered by the search functionality of XIS, which is also used for editing and fine-tuning the CEDB backend. ASCE will continue to work with Access Innovations for help with new content ingestion and continued improvements to the database.
For further information, visit www.dataharmony.com.
About Access Innovations, Inc. – www.accessinn.com, www.dataharmony.com, www.taxodiary.com
Founded in 1978, Access Innovations has extensive experience with Internet technology applications, master data management, database creation, thesaurus/taxonomy creation, and semantic integration. Access Innovations’ Data Harmony software includes machine aided indexing, thesaurus management, an XML Intranet System (XIS), and metadata extraction for content creation developed to meet production environment needs. Data Harmony is used by publishers, governments, and corporate clients throughout the world.
About ASCE – www.asce.org
Founded in 1852, the American Society of Civil Engineers represents more than 150,000 civil engineers worldwide and is America’s oldest national engineering society. ASCE is the world’s largest publisher of civil engineering content, an authoritative source for codes and standards, and a leading provider of technical and professional conferences and continuing education. The 250,000-entry, bibliographic Civil Engineering Database (CEDB) is the Society’s archival record of published ASCE content and is available free to the public at http://cedb.asce.org. The CEDB includes direct links to the ASCE Library at http://ascelibrary.org, which is the repository for all digital ASCE Publications—including 35 journals, 425 conference proceedings, and 400 e-books and standards.
