Science Models as Value-Added Services for Scholarly Information Systems

The paper introduces scholarly Information Retrieval (IR) as a further dimension that should be considered in the science modeling debate. The IR use case is seen as a validation model of the adequacy of science models in representing and predicting structure and dynamics in science. Particular conceptualizations of scholarly activity and structures in science are used as value-added search services to improve retrieval quality: a co-word model depicting the cognitive structure of a field (used for query expansion), the Bradford law of information concentration, and a model of co-authorship networks (both used for re-ranking search results). An evaluation of the retrieval quality when science model driven services are used turned out that the models proposed actually provide beneficial effects to retrieval quality. From an IR perspective, the models studied are therefore verified as expressive conceptualizations of central phenomena in science. Thus, it could be shown that the IR perspective can significantly contribute to a better understanding of scholarly structures and activities.Comment: 26 pages, to appear in Scientometric

Bibliometric-enhanced Retrieval Models for Big Scholarly Information Systems

Bibliometric techniques are not yet widely used to enhance retrieval processes in digital libraries, although they offer value-added effects for users. In this paper we will explore how statistical modelling of scholarship, such as Bradfordizing or network analysis of coauthorship network, can improve retrieval services for specific communities, as well as for large, cross-domain large collections. This paper aims to raise awareness of the missing link between information retrieval (IR) and bibliometrics / scientometrics and to create a common ground for the incorporation of bibliometric-enhanced services into retrieval at the digital library interface.Comment: 4 pages, IEEE BigData 2013, Workshop on Scholarly Big Data: Challenges and Idea

Un modèle de Recherche d'Information Sociale pour l'Accès aux Ressources Bibliographiques : Vers un réseau social pondéré

International audienceCet article propose une nouvelle approche, basée sur les réseaux sociaux, pour laccès aux ressources bibliographiques. Nous introduisons un modèle dinformation sociale dont les auteurs sont les principales entités et les relations sont extraites à partir des liens de coauteur et de citation. En effet, ces relations sont pondérées en tenant compte des interactions entre les auteurs et des annotations sociales produites par les utilisateurs. Dans ce modèle, la pertinence dun document est estimée par combinaison de la pertinence thématique et de la pertinence sociale, qui est à son tour dérivée de limportance sociale des auteurs associés. Nous évaluons la viabilité de notre modèle sur une collection darticles scientifiques dont les annotation sociales sont extraites depuis le réseau social académique CiteULike.org. Les résultats obtenus montrent la supériorité des performances de notre modèle par rapport à la recherche dinformation traditionnelle

Improved bibliographic reference parsing based on repeated patterns

uploaded by Plaz

Autorennetzwerke: Verfahren der Netzwerkanalyse als Mehrwertdienste für Informationssysteme

"Der Arbeitsbericht informiert über Entwicklungen am IZ, die darauf abzielen, Wissen über das Interaktionsgeschehen in wissenschaftlichen Communities und den sozialen Status ihrer Akteure für das Retrieval auszunutzen. Grundlage hierfür sind soziale Netzwerke, die sich durch Kooperation der wissenschaftlichen Akteure konstituieren und in den Dokumenten der Datenbasis z.B. als Koautorbeziehungen repräsentiert sind (Autorennetzwerke). Die in dem Bericht beschriebenen Studien zur Small-World-Topologie von Autorennetzwerken zeigen, dass diese Netzwerke ein erhebliches Potential für Informationssysteme haben. Kernansatz der beschriebenen Retrievalmodelle ist die Suche nach Experten und das Ranking von Dokumenten auf der Basis der Zentralität von Autoren in Autorennetzwerken." (Autorenreferat

Supporting the Discoverability of Open Educational Resources: on the Scent of a Hidden Treasury

Open Educational Resources (OERs), now available in large numbers, have a considerable potential to improve many aspects of society, yet one of the factors limiting this positive impact is the difficulty to discover them. This thesis investigates and proposes strategies to better support educators in discovering OERs. The literature suggests that the effectiveness of existing search systems, including for OER discovery, could be improved by supporting users, such as teachers, in carrying out more exploratory search activities closer to their existing methods of working. Hence, a preliminary taxonomy of OER-related search tasks was produced, based on an analysis of the literature, interpreted through Information Foraging Theory. This taxonomy was empirically evaluated to preliminarily identify a set of search tasks that involve finding other OERs similar to one that has already been identified, a process that is generally referred to as Query By Example (QBE). Following the Design Science Research methodology, three prototypes to support as well as to refine those tasks were iteratively designed, implemented, and evaluated involving an increasing number of educators in usability oriented studies. The resulting high-level and domain-oriented blended search/recommendation strategy transparently replicates Google searches in specialized networks, and identifies similar resources with a QBE strategy. It makes use of a domain-oriented similarity metric based on shared alignments to educational standards, and clusters results in expandable classes of comparable degrees of similarity. The summative evaluation shows that educators do appreciate this strategy because it is exploratory and – balancing similarity and diversity – it supports their high-level tasks, such as lesson planning and personalization of education. Finally, potential barriers and opportunities for the uptake of OER discovery tools were investigated in a structured interview study with experts from the OER field. Identified issues included how to work across multiple OER portals, variability in the use of metadata and how to align with the working practices of teachers. The findings of the thesis can be used to inform the research and development of methods and tools for OER discovery as well as their deployment to serve the needs of educators

A model of scientists' information seeking and a user-interface design

Information systems that are available today do not optimally address the information-seeking behaviour of scholars, particularly those who belong to scientific communities; as a result, scholarly discovery is often cumbersome and incomplete. The hypothesis of this study is that an information-seeking system that is designed to address the nature of scholarly materials and the information seeking behaviour of scholars, particularly the members of one scientific community, will increase the effectiveness of the scholars’ searches and enable them to find and obtain relevant materials with greater ease and precision than current practices do. The information-seeking behaviour and search practices deployed by high-energy physics (HEP) researchers are explored through a series of interviews and observations. More than 2,100 responses obtained from a HEP survey are also examined; in particular, the participants’ open-ended responses are analysed. On the basis of qualitative and quantitative research regarding the characteristics of HEP scientists and their information-seeking practices, a set of six personas, representing typical members of the HEP community, is constructed. An original model is developed that leverages existing models of information behaviour, information seeking, and information searching and reflects the full spectrum of active information-seeking and information-searching practices of HEP scholars and the nature of the data that these researchers seek. The model is then evaluated by means of seven scenarios involving the personas constructed earlier. On the basis of the information-seeking model, a software user interface is designed as the future interface for the HEP INSPIRE information system. The user-interface design is corroborated through the model, and the personas are used to evaluate the design. Methods are suggested for long-term quantitative and qualitative monitoring of the ways in which this design supports HEP researchers. It is argued that the proposed user interface, which provides an information environment that accommodates the information-seeking practices of the HEP community in a friendly and efficient manner, will support HEP academic research—and research of other scholarly communities that share some of the HEP community’s characteristics—by shortening the search process and improving the findability of quality materials. This thesis contributes to the body of information-science knowledge in the novel modelling of information-seeking behaviour of a well-defined scientific community, the use of personas for the modelling, and the concretization of the model into a new user-interface design

Cooperation between direct manipulation and proactive software agents in agent based information systems

Die wissenschaftliche Informationsbeshaffung wird zunehmend durch digitale Bibliotheken und verteilte Internetquellen gestützt. Dadurch bietet sich dem Nutzer schon von seinem Arbeitsplatz aus eine Fülle von Informationsangeboten, deren Inhalte aber bisher weitgehend isoliert nebeneinander existieren. Tiefe Verknüpfungen auf verschiedenen Handlungsebenen sind notwendig für die tatsächliche Nutzung des Potentials an Mehrwert, die in Reichweite scheint. Die Unterstützung des Anwenders in Hinblick auf Informationskompetenz und Recherchestrategie ist eine Notwendigkeit für ein zufriedenstellendes Ergebnis; das zeigen sowohl die theoretische Analyse, als auch die empirischen Studien, die die Konzeption und Implementation des Informationssystems DAFFODIL begleitet haben. Die Integration der Informationsquellen und strategische Unterstützung durch höhere Suchfunktionen erleichtert das Erreichen der Ziele des Nutzers. Die Unsicherheit bei der Recherche kann durch kontextnahe Vorschläge und Hilfestellungen reduziert werden. Im Kern wird der Frage nachgegangen, wie der Zielkonflikt zwischen proaktivem Verhalten der Software-Agenten zur Unterstützung der Anwender und deren grundlegendem Bedürfnis nach Handlungsautonomie aufgelöst werden kann. Ausgehend von diversen bekannten Verwendungsmustern von Software-Agenten wird gefolgert, dass die weitgehende Bewahrung der Benutzerautonomie und die unaufdringliche Präsentation von Vorlagen den Bedürfnissen der Anwender am besten entspricht. Auch bei der föderierten Integration verteilter Datenquellen können Software-Agenten die Aufgaben der Integration, der Homogenisierung von Metadatenschemata und der damit verbundenen semantischen Heterogenitätsbehandlung und das Filtern und Relevanzbewerten zusammengeführter Resultate übernehmen. Die prototypische Implementation im Rahmen von DAFFODIL belegt, dass dies möglich und produktivitätssteigernd ist. Die in DAFFODIL vorgenommene vertikale Implementierung der erfolgversprechenden Konzepte in Bezug auf die Arbeitsteilung zwischen Informationssystem und Anwender – auf allen Ebenen – und die durchgängige Begleitung durch empirische Evaluation ruft zur ganzheitlichen Herangehensweise an fachbezogene Literaturrecherchesysteme vor dem Hintergrund der aktuellen Informationsfülle auf. Die Ergebnisse zeigen: Das System kann nicht nur von Experten genutzt werden, sondern auch unerfahrene Anwender bei der erfolgreichen Recherche unterstützen

Bootstrapping Web Archive Collections From Micro-Collections in Social Media

In a Web plagued by disappearing resources, Web archive collections provide a valuable means of preserving Web resources important to the study of past events. These archived collections start with seed URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) hand-selected by curators. Curators produce high quality seeds by removing non-relevant URIs and adding URIs from credible and authoritative sources, but this ability comes at a cost: it is time consuming to collect these seeds. The result of this is a shortage of curators, a lack of Web archive collections for various important news events, and a need for an automatic system for generating seeds. We investigate the problem of generating seed URIs automatically, and explore the state of the art in collection building and seed selection. Attempts toward generating seeds automatically have mostly relied on scraping Web or social media Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). In this work, we introduce a novel source for generating seeds from URIs in the threaded conversations of social media posts created by single or multiple users. Users on social media sites routinely create and share narratives about news events consisting of hand-selected URIs of news stories, tweets, videos, etc. In this work, we call these posts Micro-collections, whether shared on Reddit or Twitter, and we consider them as an important source for seeds. This is because, the effort taken to create Micro-collections is an indication of editorial activity and a demonstration of domain expertise. Therefore, we propose a model for generating seeds from Micro-collections. We begin by introducing a simple vocabulary, called post class for describing social media posts across different platforms, and extract seeds from the Micro-collections post class. We further propose Quality Proxies for seeds by extending the idea of collection comparison to evaluation, and present our Micro-collection/Quality Proxy (MCQP) framework for bootstrapping Web archive collections from Micro-collections in social media