In February this year our community came together to endorse the 2020 Aristotle Roadmap. This roadmap included a range of exciting new features and additions to the Aristotle Metadata Registry.
During the first half of 2020 we’ve all had to make some adjustments to our work environment in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. For Aristotle Cloud Services, this included changing how we worked and changes to how we deliver services to our clients. To support our clients, we produced a guide to remote working using the Aristotle Metadata Registry. We’ve also launched a new Aristotle labs for showcasing ways to incorporate Aristotle with existing tools. This labs site included a COVID-19 Data dashboard to demonstrate to our clients how they can incorporate Aristotle into how they report their own data.
While we have had to adjust our product Roadmap based on ongoing global and national events, we’ve still been able to release a number of new features to Aristotle clients that we’ve covered below!
New features already available in Aristotle
New standards-aligned dataset functionality
We’ve published our review of the additions to the ISO 11179 standard for datasets, and added new features for the management of data assets. This includes additions to dataset editors to capture data provenence and lineage information to record and trace the source of data. We’ve also published a document to demonstrate alignment with existing data standards to support mappings between the Aristotle Metadata Registry and government data portals.
Metadata toolbox, reporting and visualisation
We’ve added a new metadata toolbox into Aristotle. This toolbox gives users a one-stop area to find tools for interpreting and analysing metadata, and the ability to generate metadata reports to answer questions about content in the registry tool. In an upcoming release we are also releasing a new tool for metadata import from Excel.
The Metadata Report Builder, listing all the metadata in the registry that has been created in the last 20 years.
Support for simple data dictionary imports
This week we are releasing the Simple Data Dictionary Importer that will allow users to bulk upload metadata from CSVs and Excel spreadsheets directly into Aristotle. This will make it easier to onboard new users into Aristotle, by giving them the power to import bulk metadata from their existing sources. By using a simple format based on common text formats, new users can create and transform metadata in familiar tools, ready for import into Aristotle. Details on how to upload using this new tool will be available on our blog and in the help soon.
The Simple Data Dictionary Importer will allow users to bulk upload metadata from CSVs and Excel spreadsheets.
Community updates
Aristotle Knowledge Base - our redesigned help pages
Speaking of our help site, we completely redesigned our help pages using Zoho, a leading documentation management tool, to make finding help easier and more intuitive for users. Our new help pages page are easier to navigate and include the ability for direct feedback on help documentation so we can track which pages are the most used, most useful, and most in need of attention.
Newly launched community forums
For when users need more direct help, we’ve launched our new Discourse powered community forums. Our metadata forums are designed to help new and established users of the Aristotle Metadata Registry connect and communicate, and to learn how other users work within the system. We’re already seeding the forums with discussion based on new features, user guides based on common user stories, and developers guides to help software developers learn how to integrate Aristotle into their tools using our APIs.
Upcoming features
Metadata editor and creation improvements
Our development team is still hard at work building our new editing tools which are due for release in mid-August. These new editors will be faster, cleaner and more interactive to make the management of metadata a more intuitive process. The first iteration of the new metadata editors will provide minor improvements to the current editor and retains most of the same Aristotle look-and-feel to reduce the need for retraining on how to use the new editor.
However, this new editor backend will make it easier to incorporate changes in future releases.
To make these improvements, these editors are a complete redesign that takes advantage of our powerful Aristotle metadata API, which will provide our development community a full demonstration of the actions that can be done using our API.
Enhanced support for hierarchical classifications
We have already built an exciting internal proof-of-concept for classifications management directly within Aristotle. We’ve selected the United Nations Generic Statistical Information Model and Neuchâtel Terminology Model as the basis for our classification management tool to continue our alignment with international standards. This standard covers many use cases for statistical classification management, and integrates with ISO 11179. In the coming months, we will be adding classification support into the new API-based Aristotle metadata editor based on this standard, and have a planned release for late August for these new features.
The new classification viewer will also include links to related classifications so users can see the mapping of classifications to related standards.
Final words
There are plenty of new features we’re looking forward to releasing in the second half of the year, and with the release of our new community forum, we’re excited to start gathering more feedback on how people are using these new features and what features they see as important for Aristotle as start looking ahead to the 2021 Roadmap!
Discuss this post on our community forum: https://aristotle.trydiscourse.com/
