| We propose a new approach to scientific information production and dissemination. In this approach, a set of user-friendly and advanced tools and services are organised in an open system to support research information production, management, access, and use in a coherent manner. As an implementation and to make possible the evaluation of the system, these tools and services will be integrated on a web-based portal for the high-energy physics community.
Objectives:
The proposed system will support the activities of document writing, reviewing, publishing, searching, disseminating and reading, as well as the communication among members of the research community. The effectiveness of the implemented system will be demonstrated by an experimental evaluation. This approach is suitable for supporting a more productive research community, in which researchers can work in a more effective, inexpensive, and pleasant way: delays and costs due to paper documents can be considerably reduced, multimedia can be added to electronic documents, information access can be improved (and information overload decreased) by using advanced information retrieval and filtering techniques.
Work description:
After a first phase of user requirement gathering, we intend to start several lines of research, one for each of the essential improvements we intend to develop. These cover the user interface, the improvement and integration of the Okapi information retrieval system and the support to the development of adequate tools for authors to typeset their documents. At the same time, we intend to put online a database for multimedia resources to be accessible on-demand by users and integrate the existing databases into a fully cross-referenced one. Finally, the portal will run a number of tools to allow users to comment and judge documents, a system that observes users searching information, and intervenes when opportune with suggestions, a cognitive information filtering system and a social information filtering system working on the basis of other users' judgment. All parts are integrated and made available online by the portal. The entire portal is synchronized across a number of nodes geographically distributed to minimize bandwidth problems. A consortium of libraries, European research institutes and commercial publishers will be formed in order to maintain, run and exploit the portal.
Milestones:
The first step is the integration into the web-based PORTAL-0.0 of tools that are already available to users online, namely extensive databases like arXiv and SPIRES, electronic journals like JHEP, search engines like Okapi and typesetting languages like LaTeX.
PORTAL-0.5 integrates these services with some preliminary tools developed in our project; at this stage, users' comments are reviewed.
Tools developed for PORTAL-0.5 are further integrated in PORTAL-1.0, new tools are added, and the prototype is made available online to a larger user community. PORTAL-1.0 will be evaluated with laboratory and real-world experiments. |