JISC

See a short video introducing this project

Background

Knowledge repositories proliferate at an accelerating rate. While these offer excellent support for specific information searches, there is limited support for unstructured browsing or semi-structured information gathering, when a user does not know what there is to know (but wants to find information connecting known concepts). Students making the transition from School to University often feel swamped by information and need to develop skills in information literacy. There is strong evidence that Wikipedia is a very important source of information for University students (consider the JISC SEEL project), especially in year one. Tools for understanding the structure of information in these large repositories and for conducting semi-structured queries are needed by University students and by the general public.

Concept linkage in knowledge repositories

This project will build a tool for semi-structured searching of knowledge repositories based on finding previously unknown concepts that lie between other concepts. Consider a user who wanted to know about optimisation of crystal structures. A search which looks for concepts which lie between and hence connect 'optimisation' and 'crystal structure' may turn up previously unknown concepts such as 'genetic algorithms' or 'space groups' – which would be very difficult to find via conventional approaches to search (which assume that the user has a good understanding of what terms to search for).

This project brings together the School of Computing Information and Media and the Teaching Quality Enhancement Group at the University of Bradford, together with the National Media Museum (based in Bradford). Hence the project has a range of critical friends to increase applicability, take up and longevity of the developed tool. The National Media Museum is in the process of assembling a gallery about the history, evolution and social impact of the Internet, and the proposed project may yield a tool which may form part of that gallery, in which case a very large number of users will try the system via the National Media Museum’s web site and physical gallery space. Working with the National Media Museum provides a unique opportunity to add value to the project by raising public understanding and awareness of new ways to understand and use information repositories, including the largest repository of them all, the Internet. Please note that the future Internet gallery is not yet in the public domain and therefore the National Media Museum would need to review and approve any press releases or information concerning the gallery, or the relationship of this project to the gallery.

Project reports

Project Plan

Project blog