Wikipedia
Heurist is an online database designed for digital research objects including bibliographic records, web bookmarks, historical events, document annotations, images, contemporary stories and other data which is rich in text and classification data, and often heterogeneous. Heurist was originally designed by Ian Johnson (from 2005) and developed by the (now disbanded) Arts eResearch unit (AeR) at the University of Sydney. It continues to be developed within the Faculty of Arts. It was released as Open Source software on Google Code in May 2013 (version 3.1.0) and a free web service for low-demand academic databases is available at http://heurist.sydney.edu.au - other free services are listed in the project web site (http://HeuristNetwork.org).
Heurist was developed to overcome two problems identified as common to researchers in the Humanities (and others):
- the technical expertise required to set up rich heterogeneous databases with relationships between entities, and to publish data selectively to the web
- the fragmentation of research data across many separate incompatible databases
It aims to tackle the first issue by providing a web service supporting the on-demand creation and configuration of new databases through a web interface. It aims to tackle the second issue by allowing the storage and interlinking of a wide variety of research data, notes, annotations and digital attachments in a single shared database, while providing individual ‘views’ on this data and workgroup-owned and private areas for research in progress.