ADVISER

http//:ADVISEReu.vws.co.uk

Discovering, Disseminating & Exploiting Project Deliverables

& other results of Framework 4 & 5 RTD projects

Presented at

TERENA - NORDUnet 1999

About ADVISER A large scale demonstration project in the

Telematics Applications Programme, to: offer a service, with better visibility of RTD “results” better access to people who produced

them or can interpret them, via: On-line access to project summaries,

home pages, deliverables etc. On-line interaction with technology brokers

ADVISER services E.g., istADVISER (part of bidADVISER)

classifies ACTS, ESPRIT & TAP projects using terms from the IST thematic areas

Issues in ADVISER Discovery - who is doing what?

details / deliverables of projects Dissemination - who to?

Researchers, end-users, intermediaries, brokers

Exploitation - for what purpose? the significance of what you find

Performance (e.g., response time)

Discovery & use would be easy, if only... Projects all presented their results in the

same way, & used metadata to do it The metadata met most people’s needs We could find relevant information

instantly & extract it automatically We knew how to exploit the information

In reality…

With a few exceptions (e.g., DESIRE), it is hard to find high quality data on the web efficiently and effectively

In ACTS, ESPRIT, TAP, BRITE-EURAM: under half of projects have web pages there is no reliable index of web pages there is little or no meta-information

What is available now?

Variable data from project homepages Accurate but uninformative basic data

about the existence of RTD projects (e.g., from CORDIS)

Horizontal action / Support actions (e.g., EXPLOIT, ETHOS, NECTAR, SCIMITAR)

Selected “showcase” information (e.g., PROSOMA), which highlights projects that are felt to be particularly interesting

Data in homepages - 1

project identity summary of project aims and objectives links to related projects partner information who to contact for project information summary of deliverables AND...

Data in homepages - 2

list of on-line deliverables other project publications relevant non-project publications project presentations project demonstrators hardware or software products news

Variability in data

Hard to automate resource-discovery, because the terms used vary, e.g.: “summary of project aims and objectives”

is called Purpose / Overview / Objectives / Project aims

“partner information” is called Partners / Who are we? / Consortium / Participants

Imagine the problems for multi-linguality!

Relevance to companies They want to know

whether our coverage is complete what potentially-useful results have

been produced whether the results are relevant to their

own regional situation how they can make use of those results

in their region

Information must be complete & up-to-date

Some technologies for this (in ADVISER): data merging (combine multiple sources of

data including lists of projects) data mining (e.g., in the TREVI project of

PROSOMA) metadata (e.g., tables of contents, added to

project web sites) bridging services, directory services &

caching (e.g., to create persistent data objects).

Is the information on RTD results significant?

Most metadata does not tell you this It is not sensitive to context

It gives a precise and accurate description (which is good)

but it largely ignores its purpose (bad) We need context-sensitive metadata

This assumes ‘content’ is part of a process

What makes RTD results get noticed? Some ideas

Providing a context to make them relevant to people and companies who were not directly involved in the original RTD work

Providing information on who is using the results

Providing information on what is being done with the results

Adding value to RTD

ADVISER is being used by technology brokers and other intermediaries They add a context for understanding the

business relevance of RTD results They can find out who is using the results They can find out what the uses are They can find markets and applications

Working with ADVISER We have successfully showed how to

provide on-line access to ever-changing grey information about RTD results.

We are keen to do more, & to collaborate with other providers of tools and services

Try us now at http://ADVISEReu.vws.co.uk

Or mail: billw@scs.leeds.ac.uk