Jul 01

Welcome to the JISC-funded dotAC project!

Our aim is to develop a prototype demonstrator that synthesises research information from heterogeneous sources, resolves name co-reference issues between the sources, and presents it to research-focussed end users through an interface that will allow them to explore the state of the research landscape in UKHE.

We’re building on a series of successful Semantic Web applications that have harnessed research information to provide users with a navigable information space that they can use to better understand the context of their research communities.

The first of these, CS AKTive Space, was developed as part of the Advanced Knowledge Technologies interdisciplinary research collaboration, and won the first Semantic Web Challenge in 2003. Our experiences from CS AKTive Space led to a collaboration as part of the EU-funded ReSIST network of excellence, where we developed RKB Explorer, a flexible platform for browsing and managing Open Linked Data.

Our goal is to aggregate publicly available research data from institutional repositories (via OAI-PMH) and research council information systems (typically in CERIF format) and use RKB Explorer as the basis for a browser over the data, further supplementing it with geographical visualisations. The key components of our work will be to develop expressive ontologies for representing CRIS data (with the goal of exporting CERIF data in a way that enables it to become part of the Web of linked data), and to manage the issue of coreference between the heterogeneous sources that we’re using (different names for the same entities).

Our research team is as follows:

One Response to “Welcome to dotAC”

  1. Final Report Says:

    […] Welcome to dotAC (July) […]

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