JISC

Conferences, workshops and seminars are primary and vitally important means of dissemination of research findings. They are also a meeting place for researchers and users of research and as such are also critical elements in the peer review process. The academic and practical value of conference attendance is reflected in the very significant sums of both funding and time invested in conference attendance by institutions that fund the conferences themselves and those that fund the delegate fees. The coupling of ; interactions and informal conversations and debates outside of conference sessions provides possibly the most effective means for scholars and practitioners to network and build relationships and collaborations. However the new knowledge generated during discussions and conference panel sessions and workshops can be effectively lost to all those not present, as these insights are rarely put in the form of formal outputs. Increasingly though, this information is being captured: keynote presentations are videoed; delegates make Blog entries; session Internet Relay Chat discussions are recorded. These and other informal output can provide a very valuable asset to those who were unable to attend a particular session. However it is rarely the case that such content is easily located, and very rarely that it is linked to from an official conference web site.   

Aims and Objectives   

This project aims to develop a proof of concept system to enable the integration of web-based content (and references to non web-based content), related to individual conferences and individual sessions within conferences, thus providing a means to provide far great benefit to the wider research community than is currently available from conference attendance.  

The specific objectives are to:

• Review the existing practices with respect to conference output including nature of outputs and publication channels and relative effectiveness at reaching and meeting the needs of different audiences.
• Provide a proof of concept system for integrating relevant information and providing associated interfaces for delivering this information as a web services and via other existing customisable web-based portal interfaces(s). The system would be used and evaluated within the context of at least one national or international conference.
• Develop a pilot framework and infrastructure for linking and integrating web-based, content, metadata and other external contextual data (e.g. papers or research projects) related to conferences and sessions within conferences.
• Review existing technologies and technical/metadata or other standards used by existing conference information management and publication systems.
• Review learning from related web-based data integration projects involving academic related data.
• Investigate the feasibility and wider issues (e.g. economic, legal, ethical, social and political issues) involved in developing such a system on a national or international scale.

Project Methodology  

We will be focussing on gathering needs analysis data from key communities, incl uding researchers, conference attendees and organisers, and research funding bodies. Technical development would follow ILRT’s ethos of using open standards and Open Source software. Key standards and technologies we anticipate using in this project include:

• Semantic web (W3C) standards. These will from basic information and knowledge representation and internal technical infrastructure).
• Metadata standards and ontologies/vocabularies.
• Web services & portal standards. The system would be created such that it could act as an information source to portal infrastructures.
• RSS . Given that RSS is a very widely used means of sharing information across the web, it seems likely that it will be useful for the system.

Implications/ Deliverables/ Stakeholders  

Even at a proof of concept stage we would envisage that the system should provide outputs that demonstrate significant research and educational value in integrating information from across the Web related to specific events – this can be generalised to any kind of event or indeed other ‘category’ of information. This would be of obvious advantage to both researchers and research funders. We anticipate that the review of non-technical issues (e.g. current practice, economic, legal, ethical, social and political, etc.) will provide significant insight into the generic, wider issues involved in similar web-scale information integration projects or initiatives. We would envisage that, assuming the system demonstrates the values described above and non-technical issues do not present to great an obstacle, that the work could be taken forward by a similar, possibly larger scale and scoped project to provide a system/service that can be used across the world by researchers and other potential users e.g. tutors and students.  

Project Partners

None