History

Seamless in Essex

The Seamless project began life as a British Library Research & Development funded project to investigate searching of distributed local information providers in Essex.

Fretwell-Downing Informatics created the portal to search across distributed databases and web sites in a consistent way. The Seamless project developed and successfully implemented common standards - the Seamless Application Profile based on GILS, the community information thesaurus and a place name list.

The thirty nine initial partners included local councils, universities, health trusts, voluntary and community agencies such as Citizen Advice Bureaux, Essex Disabled Peoples Association, Royal Association for the Deaf, Community Voluntary Organisations and Essex Libraries community database.

Seamless also identified the need for further development work, to provide metadata tools, an automated thesaurus and place list and data from national information providers.

NOF Funding

Under the NOF Digitisation Fund nine local authorities applied for funding to develop citizens information systems. Essex County Council's proposal focussed on integrating information from local and national information providers. NOF grouped all the applications into one consortium which they asked ECC to lead and provided funding of £865,000 over two and a half years.