The Royal Observatory Greenwich

Client

Royal Observatory Greenwich

Industry

Public Sector/Museum/Education

Technology

Amaxus Content Management System

Site

http://www.rog.nmm.ac.uk

The Royal Observatory Greenwich (ROG) is a centre of excellence for modern astronomy. Founded in 1674 by King Charles II, the Observatory is the home of Greenwich Mean Time.

Background

The ROG had built up an established web presence over a number of years. A dedicated team had been put together to develop and maintain the growing sites, including the ROG site, the National Maritime Museum site, and the Journal of Maritime Research (JMR). The sites were developed using a mixture of HTML and small databases.

The sites had grown rapidly over time and in an ad hoc fashion, and were becoming increasingly difficult to manage. Without a structured workflow process, site content could not be administered and controlled. The process of updating and adding new content had become a laborious task; a disincentive for the observatory and museum to use the site to its full potential. Another side-effect of this ad hoc development was inconsistent design, combined with inconsistent navigation and page structure. Usability and accessibility had become serious issues.

Visitors to the site also suffered, due to the inconsistent design and the lack of an intuitive navigation and search facility.

Solution

Box UK proposed the implementation of Amaxus, its roles-based Content Management System, in order to facilitate the publishing and management of content across the separate domains. An important aspect of the suggested solution was the use of XML. The ROG, NMM and JMR had an extraordinary amount of content and using XML would enable the content to be tagged from a set list of 'keywords and phrases', effectively placing the content in context. This would have a great and immediate impact. Content would effectively become 'intelligent', enabling users to find it more easily via a variety of mediums.

One issue with using XML is that existing content needs to be 're-versioned'. This entails extracting the text from the existing HTML code, uploading it o the CMS, and then applying the relevant metadata. With more than seven thousand pages, this could quickly become an arduous and expensive task. In order to minimise the amount of manual intervention, Box UK used its content extractor application to spider the existing ROG site and extract its content and images. This was automatically inserted into the CMS, ready for tagging.

The implementation of a CMS gave the Observatory the following immediate benefits:

• Expand publishing access to contributors within the Observatory, removing the current Webmaster bottleneck.
• Create consistent navigation across the domains of the Observatory and the Museum.
• Introduce advanced levels of functionality, to both the back-end Content Management and front-end website systems.
• Create a flexible, extensible system.
• Enhance the accessibility and usability of the sites for the end user.
• The ability to integrate interactive elements (such as Flash, movies and audio) into the standard site template.

Working closely with the Observatory, Box UK addressed the issues surrounding the poor Information Architecture and the accessibility and usability problems. The result is a site that is clearly structured and easy and intuitive to use. A clear layout, using text alternatives for non-text elements and a low graphics version of the site are used to help achieve high standards of accessibility for all. The accessibility of the site has been recognised with a Visionary Design Award presented to the Museum for the site. The nationwide scheme recognises and celebrates the very best website design for visually impaired people and promotes the importance of creating web content for all.

The roles-based content management system allows the Observatory and Museum to maintain and develop three individual sites via the same interface. Through the allocation of roles, each with specific privileges and capabilities, users can be granted access to edit and amend restricted elements of the sites. Through the integrated workflow process, all content can be moderated and pass through an approval process before it is published live on the relevant site. This gives control over the published content, ensuring accuracy and consistency without the need for a complex and time-consuming audit of work.

The site was launched in October 2002, and provides on-line access to thousands of items relating to seafaring, navigation, astronomy and time measurement.