The talk appears to have generated considerable interest in the Sakai and Jasig communities, with an invitation to DevCSI to collaborate more formally.

Slides for this talk are available on Slideshare.

This represents an interesting application of Emma’s expertise in text mining and analysis, coupled with ongoing research into social networking technologies.

The article, and the paper published in ASIS&T make for interesting reading.

In conjunction with Open Repositories 2012, Edinburgh, Scotland

Text mining tools and technologies have a long history in the repository world, where they have been applied successfully for a variety of purposes. These vary from pragmatic aims such as enabling document search and browse facilities, linking related documents, identifying copies or facilitating the deposit process, to support tools for academic research. The latter category includes supporting research on the basis of a large body of documents, facilitating access to and reuse of existing work, and connecting the formal academic world with areas such as the traditional and social media. The JISC have funded a number of projects and initiatives in both areas, notably NaCTeM and the ResDis programme. Research areas as diverse as biology, chemistry, sociology and criminology have seen effective use made of text mining technologies.

However, the uptake and hence the impact of these tools has been uneven. Several obstacles to development and deployment are frequently cited, including the maturity, complexity, and in some instances cost of software packages, as well as scarcity of relevant technical skills. Text mining methods and tools can be fragile and complex, requiring significant set-up time and effort. Projects making use of text mining may also suffer from legal obstacles, such as copyright and intellectual property considerations. The benefit to be gained from deployment of text-mining tools in areas such as institutional repositories or as a research tool in its own right may be difficult to predict without a costly pilot project.

This workshop is intended to bring together contributions from practitioners and researchers in fields connected to text mining and analysis. Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished research papers: as a workshop, both work-in-progress and completed work are welcome.

This event will take place during the OR–2012 pre-conference workshop session (9th–10th July 2012).

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

1. Discipline-specific research involving text-mining: bioinformatics, chemistry, the social sciences, etc.
2. Techniques in text mining: sentiment analysis/subjectivity analysis, opinion mining, affect analysis, metaphor analysis, etc.
3. Legal aspects of text mining/analysis.
4. Current developments in text mining.
5. Metadata extraction from document text, including formal and informal metadata: document indexing, document classification, and evaluation of metadata quality.
6. Text mining for document categorisation or summarisation.
7. Text mining over the social web: community detection, timelines, etc.
8. Evaluation of text mining tools, open-source or commercial: case studies and findings.

Types of contribution

The following possible contributions are sought:
1. Full papers (6–8 pages)
2. Extended abstracts for oral presentation, posters or software demos (1–2 pages)

Submission

Papers/extended abstracts should be prepared in either Word or LaTeX using the Springer LNCS format (http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0–164–6–793341–0).
Files should be submitted by email to Emma Tonkin

Important Dates/Deadlines

• 15-May–2012 Title/Abstract submission (optional)
• 25-May–2012 Full paper/Extended abstract submission
• 8-June–2012 Decisions announced
• 25-June–2012 Submission of final papers
• 9/10-July–2012 Workshop

Publication

All accepted contributions will be published in the workshop proceedings. Authors of selected contributions will be invited to submit an extended and revised version for formal publication; to this end, a call for chapters will be launched following the workshop.

Workshop chairs

• Emma Tonkin – Innovation Support Centre, UKOLN, University of Bath, UK
• Torsten Reimer – JISC
• Paul Walk – Innovation Support Centre, UKOLN, University of Bath, UK

A draft version of this report may be downloaded from this page. Please note that comments are very welcome, and should be emailed to the author, Emma Tonkin (e.tonkin@ukoln.ac.uk).

Together with JISC, the Innovation Support Centre recognises the growing importance of CERIF in the research information management landscape in the UK – our own Rosemary Russell has recently published a study on this.

Brigitte has a very high level of expertise with CERIF and will bring strong information management skills and experience to the Innovation Support Centre. We have already worked with Brigitte a little: in particular, she was a speaker at our recent CERIF Tutorial in Bath.

We look forward to working with her!

(We’ll be posting more about the CERIF Support Project in due course)

Led by Richard Jones (Technical Lead) of Cottage Labs and Stuart Lewis (Community Manager), formerly of the University of Auckland, now of the University of Edinburgh along with oversight from Paul Walk from the UKOLN Innovation Support Centre, the project was steered by an international technical advisory group of 36 experts in the areas of repositories, standards development, and scholarly content.

The development of the standard will allow a new breed of smart deposit scenarios and software products that are able to deposit content into one or more repositories, track the deposits over time, interact with them and update, or remove them. Before SWORDv2, deposit interoperability took the form of single deposits, coined as ‘fire and forget’. Once a deposit had been made, no further interaction was possible. SWORD v2 extends its support for the Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) by adding support updates and deletions. These will enable new interoperable deposit management systems to be built that will work with any SWORD v2 compliant system.

Deposit use cases which are now possible include collaborative authoring, or getting more integrated with the publication workflow where multiple updates and versions of documents are required. Further details can be found at the SWORD website: http://swordapp.org/ or by emailing info@swordapp.org

(Text by Stuart Lewis & Richard Jones)

The workshop is described on the SCONUL website, along with links to the ‘vision’ and the accompanying presentation, both of which are linked to below for convenience:

• the vision
• the accompanying presentation on Slideshare