Heurist

Heurist

Original author(s)	Ian Johnson (Overall design), Team: Artem Osmakov, Vincent Sheehan, Tom Murtagh, Kim Jackson, Steve White, and others
Developer(s)	Faculty of Arts at The University of Sydney
Stable release	v3.1.4
Development status	Active
Written in	PHP, Javascript
Operating system	Linux, Microsoft Windows
Available in	English
Type	Web-based user-configurable data management software
License	GNU GPLv3+
Website	heuristnetwork.org code.google.com/p/heurist/
As of	March 2015

Heurist is an online database designed for digital research objects including bibliographic records, web bookmarks, historical events, document annotations, images, contemporary stories and other data which is rich in text and classification data, and often heterogeneous. Heurist was originally designed by Ian Johnson (from 2005) and developed by the (now disbanded) Arts eResearch unit (AeR) at the University of Sydney. It continues to be developed within the Faculty of Arts. It was released as Open Source software on Google Code in May 2013 (version 3.1.0) and a free web service for low-demand academic databases is available at http://heurist.sydney.edu.au - other free services are listed in the project web site (http://HeuristNetwork.org).

Heurist was developed to overcome two problems identified as common to researchers in the Humanities (and others):

• the technical expertise required to set up rich heterogeneous databases with relationships between entities, and to publish data selectively to the web
• the fragmentation of research data across many separate incompatible databases

It aims to tackle the first issue by providing a web service supporting the on-demand creation and configuration of new databases through a web interface. It aims to tackle the second issue by allowing the storage and interlinking of a wide variety of research data, notes, annotations and digital attachments in a single shared database, while providing individual ‘views’ on this data and workgroup-owned and private areas for research in progress.

Methodology

Heurist is written in PHP and Javascript, on top of a fixed MySQL data structure (all Heurist databases have the same underlying structure, as the logical structure of the database is encoded directly in the data). Entities/record types, fields and terms are defined within the database rather than being hardcoded in the software or database structure. Heurist uses a key-value pair approach linked to a primary data table instantiating typed entities, allowing variant data structures and repeating value fields. Relationships between entities are implemented as a relationship record which is no different from any other record type, apart from a few special behaviours.

Heurist has the following field types:

• Numeric (integer or decimal)
• Text (single line or memo)
• Term lists (values from a controlled hierarchically organised list)
• Date / time fields (including fuzzy dates and several alternative calendars)
• Geographic (point, line, polygon)
• Pointer fields allowing lookup of another record in the database (constrained or unconstrained)
• Relationship fields allowing the creation of typed, constrained, directional, dated and annotated relationships between records
• File attachments - this field type also allows remote files to be referenced through a URL

Heurist uses Smarty templates for user-defined reporting, and generates maps and timelines directly in the interface for any items which have geographic or time fields; embedding code is provided to generate the same reports /maps / timelines in a web page using Javascript or within an iframe. Network diagrams and schema diagrams are available in Heurist version 4.

Other functions include a bookmarklet for capturing web references, WYSIWYG formatted text and threaded discussions within records, user and workgroup tags, personal and shared saved searches, workgroup ownership of records, group notifications, and blogging. There is a Zotero bibliography synchronisation function.

For developers there is a Javascript programming API - HAPI - allowing direct read and write access to Heurist records independent of internal storage structure, and functions for transforming XML output to other forms using XSLT stored in records within the database. Heurist source code is available under GNU GPL from the Google Code repository at https://code.google.com/p/heurist/ and can be installed on any LAMP server, including virtual servers in the NeCTAR Research cloud.

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 suitable for large, structured, homogeneous, numerical datasets typical of the Sciences.

Example applications

• the Dictionary of Sydney - web site generated directly from Heurist database
• the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Gallipoli project [1]. - events stored in Heurist and generated as XML for input to the visualisation
• Early Agricultural Remnants and Technical Heritage (EARTH) Programme [2] - database of photographic and video recordings of agricultural practice
• Federated Archaeological Information Management System - generation of database schemas and interoperability with Android field data collection system

External links

• Project website
• University of Sydney