Building TERENA Academic Portal as a Community Oriented Portal

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Building TERENA Academic Portal as a Community
Oriented Portal

• Yuri Demchenko
• Project Development Officer, TERENA
• ltdemchenko_at_terena.nlgt
• http//www.terena.nl/projects/reis/

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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

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REIS Initiative (REsearch Indexing Service for
Europe)

• Started from BoF at TNNC99http//www.terena.nl/p
  rojects/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

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TERENA Academic Portal Initiative/Project (TAP)

• To supersede REIS
• Answer on vital needs of RA 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 whats behind
  the Portal
• All what community uses, develops and needs
• Multilsite and multihome for services
• Collaborative vs distributed

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Visual Information in Education and Research

• Conferences video archives vs Conference
  Proceedings
• QA 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

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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