Heurist is a flexible eResearch database capable of handling a wide variety of digital records that may describe research objects such as formal bibliographic records, web bookmarks, historical events, document annotations, images, contemporary stories and many others.

Heurist has been developed since 2005 by the Digital Innovation Unit (DIU)http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/digitalinnovation/ at the University of Sydney

University of Sydney

The University of Sydney is a public university located in Sydney, New South Wales. The main campus spreads across the suburbs of Camperdown and Darlington on the southwestern outskirts of the Sydney CBD. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and Oceania...

Heurist is used by numerous projects, including:

• the Dictionary of Sydney
  Dictionary of Sydney
  The Dictionary of Sydney is a digital humanities project to produce an online, expert-written encyclopedia of all aspects of the history of Sydney. The project is a partnership between the City of Sydney, the University of Sydney, the State Library of New South Wales, the State Records Authority of...
  
  
• the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
  Australian Broadcasting Corporation
  The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, commonly referred to as "the ABC" , is Australia's national public broadcaster...
  
   Gallipoli project http://www.abc.net.au/innovation/gallipoli/.
• Early Agricultural Remnants and Technical Heritage (EARTH) Programme http://acl.arts.usyd.edu.au/projects/earth/
• PARADISEC
  Paradisec
  The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures is a cross-institutional project that supports work on endangered languages and cultures of the Pacific and the region around Australia. They digitise reel-to-reel field tapes, have a mass data store and use international...
  
   (Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures)
• Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative
  Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative
  The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative is a digital humanities initiative involving numerous academic professors and institutions around the world with the stated goal of creating a networked digital atlas by creating tools and setting standards for dynamic, digital maps.ECAI was established in...
  
  
• CenterNet

Heurist aims to overcome the problems of research data stored in many separate incompatible databases by allowing the storage and interlinking of all research data, notes, annotations and digital attachments in a single web-accessible, shared database, while providing individual ‘views’ on this data and workgroup-owned and private areas for research in progress.

Heurist is provided as a free service to academic users.

Methodology

Heurist is written in PHP and Javascript, and built on a flexible MySQL data structure. Record types are defined within the database rather than being hardcoded in the software or database structure. Heurist's search and on-the-fly reformatting capabilities (using XML output and XSLT translations through the Cocoon engine) allow data to be entered once and repurposed as required for use in analysis, in reports, in publications, in rich content web sites and in the classroom.

Heurist can store geographic and temporal data and generate maps and timelines without programming. There is a Javascript programming API - HAPI - allowing direct read and write access to Heurist records without a knowledge of its internal structures.

Other functions include a bookmarklet and a Firefox toolbar 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. A Firefox plugin provides synchronisation of records with Zotero.

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 aimed at large, structured, homogeneous, numerical datasets typical of the Sciences.

External links

• Official website
• Digital Innovation Unit
• University of Sydney