Luminas's customer base currently spans several public and private sectors, including publishing, telecommunications, broadcasting, research, and education.
In the publishing sector, our most recent project helped VNU Business Publications to make the transition from their legacy website infrastructure across to an Apache Cocoon solution. VNUnet.com is one of the UK’s leading technology networks, drawing together VNU’s market leading brands in a one-stop, easy-to-access portal, providing IT enthusiasts, from professionals to home users, with the information and tools they need, whenever they choose.
The sites have more than 100,000 articles online, and serves around six million page impressions a month. The conversion from legacy architecture to the new Cocoon platform took a team of Luminas, Pro-netics and VNU developers just four months to complete.
Working with Pro-netics, our Italian Orixo counterpart, we built a Content Management Publication system with a synchronised webDAV repository back-end, which now allows the customer to rapidly prototype and publish their sites.
One of our most recent research projects spanned telecommunications and broadcasting when we helped the BBC to work on solutions, built with Cocoon, which would allow them to use AAF metadata coming from within production systems in web-based systems. This is an ongoing project, which will look at mobile production paradigms where the applications we build would play a crucial role, in connecting the mobile producer with backend, real-time systems at the BBC.
Within the FE and HE arenas, we deliver major internet-facing applications developed in a close working partnership with the institution or companies involved. These are usually leading-edge projects which receive funding from bodies such as the JISC or the US's NSF to explore issues which bridge cultural or scientific heritage with new information management practices. Here, our applications play a crucial role in providing the infrastrcture to create cultural or scientific repositories which aim to provide services in the long term within academic institutions.
Some of the large-scale repositories we have built recently for HE institutions and projects include:
Artworld, providing access to primary visual source materials from art collections held at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at UEA and the Oriental Museum at University of Durham.
Virtual Norfolk, containing an unprecedented collection of original documentary resources, along with advanced commentary and collaboration features.
Fine Art is a web-based collection of work by staff and students of UK Higher Education institutions who have made a significant contribution to UK fine art education through practice. It contains work from the mid 19th century through to the present day, drawing from the collections of 10 institutions and the Council for National Academic Awards.
Arches supports and links institutions, departments, courses and modules as they introduce, evaluate and disseminate exemplary, transformative and innovative pedagogy through re-purposing new and existing collections of digital resources pertaining to ancient Greece and Rome.
The BioMed Image Archive is an online collection of around 8000 medical, dental, and veterinary images for use in learning, teaching and research. All the images have been donated by academics working in the biomedical fields in different countries.
