United Nations University Calendar – The Pulse of UNU
The UN University (UNU) is a global university with campuses around the world. Each campus has independent control of the structure of its content and not all of the material is available in RSS format. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a facility where users can browse the present, past and future activities of UNU in one place?
The Pulse of UNU
Relying on a manual, repetitive process of information discovery and capture to gather the geograhically dispersed content would add much undue burden to the UNU workforce. A UNU project looks into harvesting research and scholarly activity information from scattered UNU websites in a timely, efficient and transparent manner with as little human intervention as possible. The heterogeneous and amorphous structures of the dispersed information and the fact that contents previously seen can be changed at the source at any time are among some of the challenges that our research need to address.
Ng Chong of UN University Campus Computing Centre has developed computer algorithms and heuristics to address the challenge of aggregating online content from disparate sources with a good degree of success. The automated facility is called UNU Calendar (aka. The Pulse of UNU). It does not only fill the gap of a university-wide calendar but also presents UNU’s worldwide activities and endeavors in a heartbeat.
UNU websites are crawled automatically on a daily basis for various types of information such as publications, news, events, announcements and job postings. The harvested content is stored in a database and time-mapped to a calendar structure. The daily changes are then diffused immediately to the internal and external audiences through the UNU intranet and the public face of UNU Calendar respectively.
The consolidated UNU content can be easily integrated into websites much like embedding a shared video. It is a great way to add a global orientation to an existing website. At the same time this helps promote UNU activities and outputs on the Internet while supporting our branding efforts to project the image of a University that spans across the globe.
UNU Calendar offers three different views, including a portal view, http://portal.unu.edu and both more traditional calendar and list views of available information.
Acknowledgement: Alex Rubi of UN University Campus Computing Centre has developed the front-end of UNU Calendar.