Registering Resources in TeSS
Training resources (events and materials) may be added to TeSS to reach bigger audiences, increase impact and bolster event attendance. Registering events and training materials makes them more findable in a variety ways to various user bases.
Be seen by thousands of visitors to our site
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There are two ways to register training materials or events for display in TeSS:
- Arrange for an automatic registration solution;
- Use our form to register them manually.
Automatic Registration
TeSS features several options for automatically "harvesting" resources from external sources. This can be helpful if you are maintaining a large collection of events and materials that changes frequently.
Structured Data Types
To register resources in TeSS automatically, we need to be able to extract data from target sources reliably. To this end, it is helpful if the data is structured according to some kind of standard format.
The following are examples of the kinds of structured data that TeSS can work with.
If your website currently includes no structured data, and you’d like your resources added to TeSS, we recommend using Bioschemas to structure your site.
Schema.org / Bioschemas
Schema.org is a project run by a consortium of search engines. Schema.org has created an extensive library of schemas that web-masters can use to explicitly mark-up their websites content in order to improve search engine visibility and interoperability.
Bioschemas is an initiative to supplement the work of schema.org to help improve the findability of online resources in the life sciences.
The two main activities of Bioschemas are:- Proposing new types and properties to Schema.org to allow for the description of life science resources.
- Defining usage profiles over the Schema.org types that identify the essential properties to use in describing a resource.
TeSS supports the following Bioschemas profiles:
for events that are courses
Sitemaps
To help search engines (and TeSS) discover all the pages on a site that have Bioschemas markup, a sitemap should be used. Sitemaps are basically a directory listing of all the pages on your site.
Sitemaps are a well-established standard, and there should be sitemap libraries and plugins available for whichever software you are using to provide your site.
API
Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs, typically have endpoint URLs that, when accessed, return data in a common exchange format, such as JSON.
TeSS currently supports the APIs for:
- Eventbrite - for events
- Zenodo - for materials
- Other TeSS instances - for events
Calendar
Many organisations use calendar applications to organise and display their events. These may be custom-made or, more likely, utilise applications like Google Calendar. Calendar applications maintain an underlying file for event storage and retrieval, typically in the iCal (.ics) format.
TeSS can extract event descriptions, dates and locations from iCal files.
Sources
Owners and editors of content providers in TeSS can register and manage Sources to be automatically ingested. A source consists of a URL for TeSS to fetch, and an "ingestion method" - which hints to TeSS how the contents of the URL should be processed.
Once registered, a source will need to be approved by an administrator before it is active, but can be tested to see exactly what metadata TeSS can extract from the source.
To register a source, click the "Sources" tab on your content provider page, or if you have not yet registered a content provider, click the button below.
Register providerCurrently available user-managed ingestion methods:
- Bioschemas
Contact Us
Contact [email protected] to discuss how to register your content automatically in TeSS.
Manual Registration
Resources may be added manually to TeSS.
To do so, first register for a free account. Members of academic institutions may be able to log-in via LS-Login.
Once registered and logged in, the 'register event' and 'register material' buttons will become visible on the events and materials tabs. Alternatively click here: