Bill Whyte discusses ADVISER (ADded Value Information Service for European Research); a range of on-line services intended to provide better visibility of EU research results, including assistance with proposals for the IST Programme, a search service over ACTS, ESPRIT, TAP, and experimental services that allow regional technology brokers to provide news sheets in local languages, discussion groups and real-time multimedia consultancy. An initiative within the project proposes one single meta-tag per project web page, specifying the project name and one of 15 entity types (home page, deliverable, etc).
Does the European Union get full value for the money it spends in subsidising research and development? For at least one reason, the answer has to be, 'No'. All too often, good results are not sufficiently visible to others. Other researchers fail to capitalize on what has gone on before; Commission officials and auditors pay for the re-invention of work they have previously funded; perhaps worst of all, excellent ideas fail to be exploited because no one can understand their significance.
The ADVISER project, and its successor, ADVISER II, were set up in the Research Sector of TAP, to do something about this problem of lack of visibility. The project has moved into large scale demonstration phase and its first product, a free, on-line service [1] shown below in Figure 1, is intended to assist organisations interested in putting together proposals for the Fifth Framework IST Programme, as well as providing a fast and comprehensive search service over results from ACTS, ESPRIT and TAP. |
Users can carry out free text searches of their own choosing; alternatively, they can search for projects under the detailed activity headings used by the IST Programme. Obviously, there are not yet any IST projects up and running under any of these headings, but ADVISER currently returns details of ACTS, ESPRIT and TAP projects that match these IST activities, giving project summaries, contact details and, where they exist, home pages and information on deliverables (i.e.contractual reports). Once users have identified a project of interest, they have the option to request e-mail notification of any changes to that project, for instance, the announcement of new deliverables.
Figure 1: istADVISER is one of the services provided by ADVISER |
In addition, editing tools make it easy for information produced by intermediaries in the research process - technology brokers, horizontal observatory/support actions such as EXPLOIT, CORDIS, ETHOS, PROSOMA, NECTAR, SCIMITAR etc - to be attached to the basic project data, as short summaries with links back to the sources.
It is not always sufficient to find something: you also have to understand it. Difficulties can occur with unfamiliar jargon, foreign language or doubt about the relevance of the data to your own regional situation. To help resolve this, ADVISER is experimenting with a range of services that allow regional technology brokers, for example, Innovation Resource Centres (IRCs), to provide on-line support in the form of explanatory news sheets in local languages, discussion groups and even real-time multimedia consultancy. Partners in this experiment include the West Norway Research Institute, ISQ (Portugal), Royal University of Ghent, IRIDE (Bari, Italy) and VDI/VDE (Germany).
The project is intended to deliver a real service, not just a theoretical demonstration. As far as possible, ADVISER makes use of an integration of commercial technologies. Our platforms, designed and built by the University of Leeds, England, and TCNO, Bari, Italy, are based on Microsoft NT and SQL Server. The broker services use NetMeeting as the basis of the real-time interaction.
But, of course, there is much more to knowledge management than that. ADVISER's approach can be described as mix of automated and manual methods focussed on providing low cost creation of a well-defined search space across unstandardised, dynamic, inconsistently structured sources of information federated across a large number of web servers. We aspire to provide a highly cost-effective way of turning 'grey' information into gold.
To do this, we must resort to a mixture of manual and automated methods. The initial problem is in finding the sources. It is only when you set out to get a complete set of European RTD data that you find out how difficult the task has been for 'official' sources (for example, CORDIS) and none of them have been completely successful in locating comprehensive sources of grey information and presenting it to users in a friendly way.
In ADVISER finding things, such as page describing project deliverables, is predominately a task for our human information officer, although we do provide him with a set of search and copy tools that make life easier. Hopefully, we only need to find things once and, once we have done so manually, we can leave a machine to do the rest. We have developed automated data extraction tools than can periodically visit a site and extract any information we require for our database. Of course, if, on a subsequent visit, the system discovers that the site has changed, we can alert any interested party to this change. One line in our current research is in trying to develop automatic ways of identifying significant changes, as opposed to minor alterations to text or format. (For example, we are exploring the indexing powers of SQL Server).
The specification of the search engine across this grey information space is a major issue. We currently provide free-text searching across the project summary information and will extend this to cover other indexed web pages. We have also looked at a number of classification schemes, including Serif and FoR. However, at the moment we make most use of the thematic priorities of the Fifth Framework, especially those for the IST Programme. These comprise around one hundred terms within a three-level hierarchy.
In the case of our bidADVISER service, which provides background information to organisations interested in creating proposals for the IST Programme, we have used automated search together with domain experts to classify a large number of ACTS, ESPRIT and TAP projects under the IST thematic areas.
In general, we are not particularly optimistic about the early adoption of consistent meta-tagging for project related information. There simply does not appear to be a great deal of willingness on behalf of projects to participate. Perhaps this will change, but it is our belief that any scheme that will have any chance of success must be extremely light-weight. It must not involve any significant effort or technical skill on behalf of the project.
Nevertheless, we do have something to propose in the way of meta-tagging of project sites. Our approach is slightly less document-centred than the traditional approach through Dublin Core and the like; this is partly based on our requirement, mentioned earlier first to identify web sites before extracting information from them. We need to know the project to which a web page relates and have some idea of the context of that relation.
The ADVISER team have become, by necessity rather than by personal virtue, somewhat expert in the custom and practice employed by EU projects to create their web sites. We have looked at thousands and studied many of them in detail. An interesting fact emerges - the names given to sections of web pages and to links off these pages are extremely numerous, but the entities to which they relate are relatively few. For instance, links are given to 'partners', 'consortium', 'who we are', and so on, many names but all referring to the same thing.
It is our contention that we can cluster the project entities into a compact set of around 15 top-level terms (project aims, project home page, information on deliverables, demonstrator, and so on). We would like one single meta-tag per web page, specifying the project name and the entity type. To promote this view and to get a level of consensus on how it should be implemented, we have set up the European RTD Meta-Information Working Group, EURMI [2]. We would be delighted to welcome readers to become active or passive members of this informal group.
The ADVISER services have been extensively evaluated with real users, as part of the ADVISER and ADVISER II projects. Structured usability and utility trials led by MAC Ltd (Limerick, Ireland) have been conducted in seven countries and detailed focus-groups have been set up by Clear Communication Associates (England). A feedback form is also available on-line. The results of all this are regularly analysed in workshops involving user requirements representatives and the technical design teams. Expert user interaction skills are provided by the University of Limerick, Ireland.
ADVISER has successfully demonstrated the feasibility of providing on-line access to EU RTD results, not just the static, 'official' data, but also the ever-changing grey information. Over the remainder of the current year we intend to improve upon the current quality and comprehensiveness of our content, at the same time reducing the cost of doing so. We are keen to talk to third-party providers of information relevant to the Fourth Framework TAP, ACTS, ESPRIT projects and also any activities that are working towards the IST Programme. ADVISER's information model is geared to working with IST data and we hope to be there, next year, bringing you EU research results as they happen.
If you have any comments on this article, please contact the editors (exploit-editor@ukoln.ac.uk).
Bill
Whyte
Project Manager
ADVISER II
Email: billw@scs.leeds.ac.uk
URL: <
http://advisereu.vws.co.uk/>
Formerly a Division Manager at BT Labs, Bill Whyte is based in the University of Leeds where he is part-time project manager of ADVISER II. His latest book, 'Networked Futures: Trends for Communication Systems Development,' recently published by John Wiley and Sons (http://www.wiley.co.uk/) is a comprehensive survey of issues of interest to the IST Programme.
For citation purposes:
Bill Whyte, "Getting a
Result with ADVISER," Exploit Interactive, issue 2, 20 July 1999
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue2/adviser/>
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