Technical Information Centre

Technical information centres provide a gateway to technical, regulatory and legislative information and advice on the built environment. These gateways help to identify all publications of relevance to the industry across all of the publishers in the industry. Centres are likely to be established in national contexts, though they can also be of benefit to various membership or professional organisations.

Technical information centres aim to further enable Technology Transfer by identifying appropriate information from all sources. Users are taken directly to the publisher for full information on the publication and to enable a purchase to be made. They also allow users to establish interest profiles for automated notification of new information in their areas of interest.

CONNET recognises that quality technical information is of benefit no matter which country or organisation has published it. To this extent CONNET provides mechanisms to link together all technical information centres to provide answers to user requests at a European as well as a national level.

One of the fundamental assumptions of this service, and the CONNET initiative, is that there is benefit from bringing together as wide a range of organisations as possible. To this end we welcome the establishment of new Technical Information Centres in other countries or for other markets. We also welcome connections with existing information resellers who may sell their services to particular audiences in the countries they serve. There are several ways forward for those who wish to set up a similar service, they are summarised below:

• Compliant interfaces: for an existing system the simplest approach is to provide an interface compatible with the CONNET specifications and for a Technical Information Centre. This is detailed in full on the Help Desk.
• Development with common models: a new Technical Information Centre could be developed using the data models and API specifications as a starting point. These are available for interested parties.
• Re-use of existing service: the database, software, and machinery used to provide the initial version of a Technical Information Centre can be re-used to provide a similar service for any other interested party.
• Lease of existing service: the software created for the initial Technical Information Centre can be leased to other interested parties.
• Technical consultancy: the development team of the initial service are available to provide technical consultancy on any issue related to a Technical Information Centre to interested parties.

In all cases we are interested in talking about your requirements. See the Contact Us page for contact details.