Building TERENA Academic Portal

as a Community Oriented Portal

Yuri Demchenko

Project Development Officer, TERENA

<demchenko@terena.nl>

http://www.terena.nl/projects/reis/

Video and Streaming over Internet as component Portal Solution

• REIS Initiative• TERENA Academic Portal Initiative/Project

– What do people need from Academic Portal?

– Academic Portal as community Oriented Portal

• Visual Information in Education and Research– Cataloguing/Browsing/Searching/Indexing

REIS Initiative (REsearch Indexing Service for Europe)

• Started from BoF at TNNC’99http://www.terena.nl/projects/reis/– Main goal - to build pilot service for Research and Education community in

Europe

• Specific REIS features– Comprehensive coverage of Research-on-the-web

– Both searchable and browsable by subject

– Interactive search refinement • Finding Authoritative Resources - ”Topic Distillation”

– Adaptive crawling and automatic (pre-)classification of gathered data

– Attribute (metadata) searching • Dublin Core metadata search capability

– Multilinguality and cross-language searching • Multilingual support in interface

TERENA Academic Portal Initiative/Project (TAP)

• To supersede REIS – Answer on vital needs of R&A community in specific Information Service

• Main components– Indexing/Searching tools/engine

– Cross-Searching Automatic Indexes and human-made Subject Gateways

– Directory services

– Video-on-Demand and Streaming (plus hosting)

– Content Replication

• Portal as an access point to all what’s behind the Portal– All what community uses, develops and needs

– Multilsite and multihome for services• Collaborative vs distributed

Academic Portal goals

• Community oriented Portal– Binding and assisting specific community

– Virtual community with its Knowledge accumulation and domain specific resources

• Research diversification and knowledge accumulation• Assistive services/tools for Researchers and Educators

– building authorities in new domains

– discovering knowledge/resources in European/worldwide Internet

• Cooperation with industry– to help research community

– to provide feedback and input from research community

What do people need from Academic Portal?

• Information in specific research area– new and diverse areas not covered by existing classification and Subject

Gateways

• (Virtual) Community interaction– Possibility to talk to expert (become bound into community)

– to communicate with people

– to find colleagues

• Video/audio materials – personalised experience

• Build personal profiles and exchange of experience and findings – Shared bookmark - to accumulate highly professional experience

• Access to Open Research area– Assistive tools

– Automatic classification and knowledge mining

Academic Portal as Community Oriented Portal

• To build successful Portal you need to find/build proper community– Community membership creates willingness to cooperate in resources and

services creation and development

• Bottom-up vs Top-down approach• Possibility to communicate between people (community members)

– create cooperative environment

– virtual (point of) presence

• Finding relevant resources in diverse areas• Starting with specific area and specific services in general concept• Ask and propose to users

– user needs driven approach

Academic Portal Value-Added Services

• Combined with communication between researches– to explore common finding

– building virtual community/presence

• Knowledge Accumulation and Dissemination• Quality Information Resources enabled by “web-of-trust”• Advertisement from and linkage to the Scientific publishers

Visual Information in Education and Research

• Conferences video archives vs Conference Proceedings– Q&A – Parallel sessions – (Parallel conferences)

• Devoted lectures/seminars – Ad Hoc topics– Lectures by expert specialists

– Exchange with both teacher and auditorium

• Distance Education and Training– Courses on demand

– Hands-on and practical lessons (e.g., surgery, fiber cabling, etc.)

– Virtual classroom

• Distinctive features– Live video/speech

– Information humanisation/impersonalisation

– Still paper-like information vs train-of-thought

– Virtual presence

Where are we going to go today?

• Promote use of Video and Streaming services/archives – in knowledge rich/generating areas

– Among universities and research institutions

– Conferences

• Extend VoD and Streaming hosting Services– Among NRENs

• Maintain Directory of available resources– First try in form of List is at http://www.terena.nl/projects/reis/mmis/

– Add index/description

– Develop cataloguing/indexing tools for visual/audio information