Ingenta PLC -Results on Monday 09.06.03

Interesting addition in December 2003:


Ingenta develops revolutionary new website with Oxford University Press


Ingenta plc, the global market leader in creating Internet versions of professional and academic research publications, has designed and developed Oxford Scholarship Online with Oxford University Press, a major new web resource that takes 700 of the most important humanities and social sciences scholarly books online for the first time.

Ingenta’s transatlantic team of developers and designers, based in Providence, Rhode Island and Oxford, responded to OUP’s outline specification by developing the functionality and interface design to operate OSO. The £2million ($3.5m), five-year project integrates the original 700 books and an extra 200 titles a year with other online resources via active reference links within footnotes and bibliographies, including millions of journal articles. This enables the user to cross-reference information generated by a single search.

Speaking of the project, Geoffrey Bilder, Chief Technology Officer at Ingenta said: "We have pushed the boundaries in web design in helping OUP realise their vision for the online future of the scholarly monograph format." He continued, "Oxford Scholarship Online demonstrates that with the right content, planning, skill-set and experience you can genuinely create new kinds of web resources to benefit the scholarly community.

Some of the new technical developments created for the Oxford Scholarship Online website include:

One of the largest collections of MathML online:
With over 65,000 equations tagged in MathML by OUP, Ingenta’s new graphics engine has rendered one of the largest collections of MathML online today. Ingenta customised open source tools to integrate the conversion of MathML equations into the production process.

Content editing tools for the OUP Project Team:
A new metadata editing tool enables the Oxford University Press project team to control the seamless conversion of millions of documents into HTML, while an editing tool gives them the ability to generate and edit static pages of information.

The ability to convert large quantities and multiple types of content:
Greek, Hebrew and some additional parts of language such as Byzantine music symbols are just a few of the unusual kinds of content found in the 250,000 pages or 100 million words contained in Oxford Scholarship Online at launch. To accurately represent this content OUP developed a cutting-edge scholarly DTD (incorporating standards such as XML, CALS tables, UNICODE, and MathML), presenting Ingenta with the challenge to represent all of the formats online. This challenge was met through Ingenta’s accurate rendering of HTML from XML sources as well as the successful display of many tens of thousands of special characters.

Search optimisation:
To create a high performance, full-featured search engine, Ingenta developed a new Java framework built on the Lucene full text search engine, sponsored by the Apache Software Foundation. The framework is fully internationalised so mixed-multilingual content can be indexed and queried. The OSO search functions are built on top of this framework.

Using Java search engine gives effective search results by avoiding secondary content that could distract the user. Instead, content is indexed as close to the original sources as possible. The content is then divided to form alternative views of the content for the user.

To focus the search results further, higher weighting is applied to certain elements of each book such as keywords and abstracts.

Linking to enhance the service
To enrich the user experience, references within the bibliographies and footnotes are linked to hundreds of other web resources, including the millions of journal articles available on ingentaselect.com and ingenta.com. Other linking partners include CrossRef, Emerald, Cambridge Scientific Abstracts, the National Library of Medicine and Springer.

Speaking of the new service, Chief Executive Officer of Oxford University Press, Henry Reece said: "The vast majority of the world’s scholarship is contained in printed books the aim of Oxford Scholarship Online is to make Oxford University Press’s unrivalled academic copyrights available to scholars and students through the medium that offers the greatest opportunities for access and searching the worldwide web. This massive new cross-searchable database offers many unique and exciting features. It is fitting that, as the world’s leading scholarly publisher, Oxford should take research into a new dimension."