Heurist
| Developer(s) | Digital Innovation Unit (DIU) at The University of Sydney |
|---|---|
| Repository | |
| Available in | English |
| Type | Reference management, social bookmarking and database software |
| Website | Heurist |
Heurist has been developed by the Digital Innovation Unit at the University of Sydney as a flexible eResearch database handling a wide variety of digital records. These may describe research objects such as formal bibliographic records, web bookmarks, historical events, document annotations, images, contemporary stories and many others (currently - Sep 2009 - more than 70 record types).
Heurist is used by numerous projects including:
- the Dictionary of Sydney
- the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Gallipoli project[1].[1]
- Early Agricultural Remnants and Technical Heritage (EARTH) Programme[2]
- PARADISEC (Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures)
- Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative[2]
- CenterNet[3].[3]
Heurist aims to overcome the problems of research data stored in many separate incompatible databases by allowing the storage and interlinking of all research data, notes, annotations and digital attachments in a single web-accessible, shared database, while providing individual ‘views’ on this data and workgroup-owned and private areas for research in progress.
Data Repurposing: Create Once, Use Many Times
Heurist is built on a flexible MySQL data structure. Record types are defined within the database rather than being hardcoded in the software or database structure. Heurist's search and on-the-fly reformatting capabilities allow data to be entered once and repurposed as required for use in analysis, in reports, in publications, in rich content web sites and in the classroom.
Heurist has strong group collaboration functions, annotation and free text capabilities, and can store geographic and temporal data and generate maps and timelines without any extra programming. There is a Javascript programming API - HAPI - allowing direct read and write access to Heurist records without a knowledge of its internal structures.
Applicability
Heurist was conceived as a digital knowledgebase for managing heterogeneous and relatively unstructured data, in small to medium collections of (often textual) data such as those typically found in the Arts and Humanities, and in personal research spaces. It is not aimed at large, structured, homogeneous, numerical datasets typical of the Sciences.[4]