What is AILA?
In addition to serving as FSD’s data catalogue, data deposits are also managed through AILA. The entire AILA service portal is developed in-house by FSD and was originally launched in May 2014. The current development of AILA 2.0 began as part of the Research Council of Finland-funded project Cross-Border Tools and Services (C-BOTS 2019–2024). For FSD and its clients, AILA is a central and essential service, and maintaining and developing it is one of the Archive’s core responsibilities. Metadata from AILA is harvested to the CESSDA Data Catalogue.
Why is AILA 2.0 being developed?
The reasons and objectives behind the development of AILA portal are based on several complementary perspectives, such as technical, user-oriented, and accessibility-focused considerations.
Societal changes affect all areas of activity in our society. With the advance of digitalisation, the pace of web application development has accelerated, customer needs have evolved, and accessibility requirements have increased. The development team emphasised that there was a recognised need to renew the technical environment to ensure that the AILA service portal can remain secure and interoperable in the future.
In addition, a key focus now and in the future is customer orientation, highlighting the need for a smoother and more accessible service.
Accessibility in the context of websites and applications refers to similar principles as physical accessibility in the built environment, such as the ability to move through spaces smoothly regardless of potential personal mobility limitations.
Our discussion strongly underscored the importance of collaboration, as the development team and other contributors bring extensive expertise from different areas, such as content knowledge, metadata, and user experience.
What has been developed?
After identifying development needs, the AILA portal has been systematically renewed under the guidance of the development team, in collaboration with other FSD staff and stakeholders.
- Aila’s data security is being improved by upgrading the hashing functions for secrets to more secure and modern, tightening password requirements and secrets management practices, and securing administrative interfaces at the network level
- Accessibility is being enhanced by ensuring that text and other elements in the application have appropriate size and colour contrast, taking visual impairments into account. In addition, AILA 2.0 will be fully navigable using keyboard only. The development work has also considered Aila’s clients who use screen readers or other assistive technologies.
- Search functions have been improved to make it easier and more efficient for clients to locate the datasets they need. Below is a comparison of the old and new Aila search functions.
AILA’s current advanced search allows filtering by availability, data type, language, temporal coverage of the study, and unit of observation.
Image 1: Aila’s current advanced search.
The next screenshot shows AILA 2.0’s advanced search. In the new Aila, filtering options have been expanded, and it is now possible to filter searches by, for example, the year of data collection.
Image 2: Aila 2.0’s advanced search. Click the image to view it larger.
What’s next?
The Aila 2.0 development team will continue their work. Once AILA 2.0 reaches the deployment phase, developers will be able to focus more closely on areas requiring further refinement. You can learn more about the updates in an upcoming article.
In the next project news, we will continue with the AIMS project, where we will discuss artificial intelligence from the perspective of the Data Archive.
See this blog entry in Finnish.
Henna Kaartinen
Project Assistant
firstname.surname [at] tuni.fi
