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 Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished research papers: as a workshop, both work-in-progress and completed work are welcome.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

Last Monday, I attended a meeting with Mimas, the co-ordinators of the JISC funded Discovery Programme in order to start planning the delivery of training for Discovery in 2012. This was my first meeting with the Discovery team, and it was really good to see a few familiar faces  and  also to be able to put ‘faces’ to some well known and respected ‘names’ and tweets.

I have been aware for a while of the great work that has been done by the Resource Discovery Taskforce and it is great to have the opportunity of working on the project alongside colleagues at Mimas.

The Discovery programme is based on the vision of the Resource Discovery Taskforce to make the digital resources in our museums, libraries and archives more discoverable; both by people and machines. This is being done by developing a ‘metadata ecology’ that will improve the discovery and delivery of important collections data that often lies deep within our repositories. Most of my career has been spent building these collections and I am only too aware of the importance of improving access to the resources that lie, sometimes far to hidden, deep within our websites and databases.

The discovery vision is underpinned by a set of 5 aims and 10 targets that are available from their website at:  http://www.discovery.ac.uk/vision/, but more recently this has been built on by Paul Walk here at the ISC to create the Discovery Technical Principles, which will become a backbone of the efforts to ‘enhance the impact of our knowledge resources for the furtherance of scholarship and innovation.’  You can read more on this in Paul Walk’s post on the Technical Foundations blog.

The meeting started with some interesting discussion on how we might agree on a working definition of ‘identifier’ and whether this varied depending on the domain using the term and indeed whether it was even possible to provide a watertight definition of ‘entity’, that would be accepted by all domains.  In the end we felt it would be better to use a more pragmatic approach and use case-studies to illustrate how different  organisations have successfully tackled these issues.

The main role of the ISC within discovery  is going to be helping  Mimas with delivering their  training program.  We will be helping develop the training sessions and preparing training materials for use in the training and release through the website.  Initially, this work is starting by reviewing what relevant materials are already available from within UKOLN, such as those on APIs and metadata. We will then looking wider afield to see what is available from CETIS and other sources so that we can avoid any unnecessary duplication.

The majority of these materials will be textual, but we are also going to be producing a range of multi-media resources including video and podcasts and I will be taking the lead on the production of these, and I am really looking forward to building my experience and knowledge in this area.

There are full details of the Discovery Project Training intentions on their blogsite at:

http://blog.discovery.ac.uk/2012/02/01/embedding-the-principles-our-approach-to-guidance-materials-and-workshops-so-far/

All in all, a very useful meeting and a good start to planning training with the discovery project. Lets get going!

Although the title may seem a little dull, the report is rather exciting. I’ve been given a brief that includes assessing what I would consider to be some of the most useful outcomes of projects – the potential use of a development project by the wider community, the potential for technologies to be developed beyond the life of an individual project and the potential for building future collaboration between institutions based on shared interests identified during the review.

The term ‘assessment’ has connotations of an end, something that is done when the work is finished. What interests me in the assessment brief I’ve been discussing with the JISC programme managers involved in Inf11 is the joint emphasis on what has been achieved, and how that might be built on into the future. It’s inspiring to think that the projects included in this report will be used to share knowledge and develop technologies in one form or another into the future in the areas that they were working on during the Inf11 programme.

The report itself will be based on a review of final reports from the selected projects plus discussion with the project managers/staff who worked on the projects. The delivery date for this work is May 2012.

As part of the Greening Events II project, UKOLN published a report on Event Amplification.

Dates

Work started: 1 Oct 2011

Planned completion date: 18 Jun 2012

Actual completion date: 18 Jun 2012

Activities

This work involved the analysis of a variety of amplified events and writing a report on best practices.

Outputs

A report has been published:

[About] – [PDF format] – [MS Word format]

Links

• Greening Events II, JISC
• Greening Event II, project web site

People

This work was led by Brian Kelly.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is implementing legislation related to use of cookies on web sites.  We are involved in an activity which will summarise the implications of the legislation and provide guidance on implementation strategies.

Dates

Work started: 1 Oct 2011

Planned completion date: 29 Feb 2012

Actual completion date: 16 April 2012

Activities

This work involves setting up a small group of interested parties within the web management community, with additional input being provided by the JISC Legal service. Monitoring of advice from government bodies will be carried out and the implications shared across the sector.  The approaches being taken across a small number of institutions  to conform with legislation will be shared and advice provided on emerging best practices.

Outputs

An article was published in the JISC Inform ejournal.

A series of blog post have been published.

In addition a workshop session will be held at the IWMW 2012 event.

Links

• The Half Term Report on Cookie Compliance, 15 December 2011
• Next Steps In Addressing Forthcoming Cookie Legislation, 20 February 2012
• How is the Higher Education Sector Responding to the Forthcoming Cooking Legislation?, 16 April 2012
• The new cookie laws: how aware are you?, Spring 2012
• Why I Welcome the Government’s Business-Friendly Approach to Cookies, 26 May 2012

People

This work was led by Brian Kelly.