Registering Resources in the training portal for the photon & neutron community

Training resources (events and materials) may be added to our training catalogue to reach bigger audiences, increase impact and bolster event attendance. Registering events and training materials makes them more findable in a variety ways to various user bases.

...in our Catalogue
Be seen by thousands of visitors to our training portal for the photon & neutron community
...in search engines
Be seen in search results more owing to our search-engine optimisation

There are two ways to register training materials or events for display in our Catalogue:

  1. Arrange for an automatic registration solution;
  2. Use our form to register them manually.

Automatic Registration

The training catalogue team uses scripts to automatically register and harvest resources from target websites (e.g. e-learning.pan-training.eu). The scripts run each day, adding any new resources to our catalogue or updating any that have changed. We can write a scripts to include your resources in our catalogue, if your site:

Contains more than 3 resources
Has some structured data
Is relevant to our PaN community

The catalogue also allows a subsequent curation to exclude specific materials or events from automatic harvesting. At a more finely granular level specific metadata fields of an entry can also be modified and excluded from updates performed by a future harvesting.

Structured Data Types

To register resources in our training catalogue automatically, our scripts need to be able to extract data from target websites reliably. To this end, it is helpful if these websites include some structured data.

The following are examples of the kinds of structured data that we can work with. If your website contains one or more of these, and satisfies the criteria above, contact us and we will create a scraper.

If your website includes no structured data, and you’d like your resources added to our catalogue, we recommend using an established metadata scheme to structure your site.

Metadata Schema

schema.org is a project run by a consortium of search engines. Schema.org has created an extensive library of simple, lightweight schemas that web-masters can use to explicitly define their websites content in order to improve search engine visibility and interoperability.

For events, you can use the schema.org Event type; and for training materials: schema.org CreativeWork Type.

API

Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs, typically have endpoint URLs that, when accessed, return raw, unstyled data in a common exchange format, such as XML or JSON.

If your website has an API that programmatically displays data for your training or event content, the catalogue team can write an API client to interface with it.

Calendar

Many organisations use calendar applications to organise and display their events. These may be custom-made or, more likely, utilise applications like Google Calendar. Calendar applications maintain an underlying file for event storage and retrieval, typically in the .ics format.

If your website has a calendar application, the ExPaNDS team can write a script to extract from it the date, location and event descriptions, and upload the data to our catalogue.

Other types
  • RSS Feed: an RSS feed is a type of news format. Many websites have such feeds, which list recent posts in a standard format. We can write scripts to parse this format;
  • Git Repository: a git repository is a directory containing files that can be edited collaboratively. If you are using GitHub (or similar) to develop your training resources, and/or use GitHub Pages to render them, we can write a script that clones the repository and extracts resource information. We may a sk you to create a metadata file in YAML format to help us extract the metadata;
  • SOLR server (or similar): a SOLR server is a search engine that many sites use for their internal search functionality. If you have a publicly accessible SOLR server, we can write a script to interface with it;
  • Other: if you have training metadata in another structured format (e.g., an XML or JSON dump, a CSV file, a YAML file, or other format), we would be happy to write a script to parse it.
If your website contains any of the above, or you'd like advice about annotating schemas, you can contact us via e-mail at pan-training@hzdr.de
Manual Registration

Resources may be added manually to our catalogue.

To do so, first register for a free account. Members of our community can use Umbrella AAI to register and login in the future.

Once registered and logged in, the 'register event', 'register material' and 'register workflow' buttons will become visible on the events and materials tabs. Alternatively click here:

Register event Register material Upload and material to Zenodo and register Register workflow

If you are not sure which content type you want to register, go through our content type questionnaire:

Register content

If you have resources that change frequently, we recommended that you establish an automatic registration solution.