A first release of the user interface is ready for testing within the ReIReS consortium. The test audience will be able to explore the simple and advance search, use the metadata filter options and evaluate the record view and citation functions during ReIReS courses at KU Leuven. This live testing allows them to give more extensive feedback, which will serve to further improve the unified discovery environment.

Naturally, users from consortium partners who are not present at these courses will also have the opportunity to explore the functionalities of the user interface to explore and discover the five datasets from ReIReS partners that are available at the moment. Of these datasets, four have been imported into the graphDB database and one is searchable via federated search.

User testing not only serves to resolve possible issues but can also guide the process of adding more features. The ReIReS unified discovery environment is still a work in process and a second release later in 2020 will undergo testing as well before the final release. Besides the further refinement and configuration of the components of the technical architecture, more datasets will be added throughout the project as well.

Why do we develop this unified search platform?

The growing amount of data confronts researchers today with a new challenge, because it is spread out over different databases in different institutions. Therefore, ReIReS is developing a unified discovery environment for religious studies, which will collect relevant databases on a single platform.

Example of a search result