[CAnet - news] Social Networking tools for researchers and scientists

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http://www.calit2.net/newsroom/article.php?id=1093
Newsroom > Web Article
Calit2 Launches Research Intelligence Portal and Web 2.0 Tools to Assist
Researchers

San Diego, CA, May 4, 2007 -- Treemapping. Tag clouds. Mashups. Bug boxes.
The jargon takes some getting used to, but a new Internet portal deployed by
Calit2 offers the latest in Web 2.0-type technologies designed to help the
institute's scientists and engineers find new funding opportunities and
research partners.

The UC San Diego division of Calit2 today announced the beta release of the
Research Intelligence Portal, which promises to "aggregate to inform." The
site's tools offer information and insight that go well beyond what faculty
members traditionally have relied upon to learn about available grants and
collaborators for new research initiatives.

"We wanted to take some of the lessons learned from commercial business
intelligence efforts and then apply them to the business of a research
university," says project leader Jerry Sheehan, manager of government
relations for the UCSD division. "This portal is a living experiment in how
data mining, visualization and Web 2.0 technologies can be used to support
the research endeavor."

UCSD Vice Chancellor for Research Art Ellis has been using an alpha version
of the portal for several months. "For scholars, research intelligence tools
will help create partnerships, locate resources, and identify emerging areas
of opportunity," says Ellis. "In short, these tools have the potential to
create completely new paradigms for conducting research."

The portal relies on best-of-breed technologies culled from open-source
software; code developed in Calit2, and commercial programs, notably for the
blog and treemapping sections of the site. [For a glossary of Web 2.0
buzzwords, see bottom of article.]

"We are doing real-time business analytics along with content and knowledge
management in a participatory way," explains Sheehan. The portal is broken
into four main sections:

  +  Grant funding (Updated Daily). New and ongoing solicitations from the
federal government, with funding opportunities by agency.  Weekly maps of
new funding are also available.

  +  Industrial partners (Updated Daily). Profiles of 72 Calit2 industry
partners with up-to-date breaking news (e.g., 18 articles were posted on May
1), and interactive maps that geo-locate where each partner is
headquartered. Users can also sign up to get news via email or RSS feed, and
can search the portal's backlog of partner data.

  +  Research interests (Updated by Users). This section offers a snapshot
of Calit2 research, based on keyword data from the websites and grant
abstracts of 218 faculty and staff at UC San Diego.  The software uses
keyword analysis to generate tag clouds -- making it easier for a user to
locate a researcher with specific expertise. Likewise, the user can get a
glimpse of Calit2's overall research emphasis by choosing to look at 50 or
100 keyword tags at a glance. Separately, a treemap provides an interactive,
visual representation of the 311 federal, peer-reviewed research grants
awarded in the past four years to Calit2-affiliated faculty. Users can dig
down to details on the smallest grant, while also capturing the bigger
picture (e.g., NIH edges out NSF as Calit2's top provider of project
funding, while the Department of Defense ranks #3).

  +  Developer's Blog. This section offers site analytics; a bug box that
encourages users to report any problems with the site; and a live-chat
section that is usually staffed during business hours (Pacific time). Also
on the site: a video primer on subscribing Really Simple Syndication (RSS)
feeds.

"The Research Intelligence portal grew out of my need to see and interact
with the universe of research associated with Calit2," says institute
director Larry Smarr. "The beauty of these Web 2.0 tools is that, as more
members of the Calit2 research community begin to participate in the
creation of new content, the value of the portal increases -- not just to
individual researchers, but also to the institute as a whole."

Primary funding for development of the portal came from the UCSD Division of
Calit2. "It is critical that Calit2 remain on the cutting edge of new Web
technologies and trends such as social networking," says division director
Ramesh Rao, an electrical and computer engineering professor in UCSD's
Jacobs Shool of Engineering. "Calit2 is fundamentally interdisciplinary, and
the Research Intelligence portal will help researchers make new connections
to their counterparts around campus."

In the beta release, the faculty information is limited to the 218
researchers affiliated with Calit2 on the UCSD campus. Work is underway to
extend the coverage of the portal to include all Calit2-affiliated faculty
at UC Irvine. Already, Smarr's office has provided supplemental funding to
allow developers to beef up corporate data on the site to include Calit2
industry partners of the UC Irvine and UC San Diego divisions alike.

Members of both campuses can benefit from the portal's aggregation of
federal funding opportunities and breaking news on the institute's
industrial partners.

Calit2's Jerry Sheehan, who leads the project, outlines what the Research
Intelligence portal offers researchers and Calit2's industry partners. To
watch the video, click on the right arrow. Length: 1:34 According to
Sheehan, the site is "tapping the emerging generation of web technologies to
enable the collective intelligence of Calit2 researchers to be brought to
bear in examining new research opportunities and collaborations."

The Research Strengths component of the portal uses software to analyze each
investigator's research interests by culling through publicly available
abstracts of grants or other available documents, as well as one web page
affiliated with each researcher. All of the text is run through a web
application programming interface (API) used by Yahoo! on its searches, as
well as the Keyword Extractor and Analyzer (KEA) algorithm, which takes a
text or a web page URL as input and spits out keywords. The result: a high
degree of accuracy in selecting a weighted series of keywords that reflect
each UCSD researcher's interests. With those keywords, the portal can then
automatically search through new funding opportunities and feed the
pertinent ones to specific researchers via Really Simple Syndication (RSS)
or email.

More accurate keywords make for more relevant funding alerts, so the beta
version lets Calit2-affiliated researchers edit their profiles, and
keywords, and export any of this data to their web pages or other social
bookmarking sites. In the next round of tool development, users will also be
able to upload their own documents and web pages and get back appropriate
keywords for submission. "Even with the best algorithms in the world, the
accuracy of extracting key words will always benefit from the active
participation of the researcher," says Sheehan. "The foundation of this
portal is that it is based on the participatory Web 2.0 model, and as more
researchers upload content, the more valuable the entire service will be for
that researcher as well as for all users of the site."

The portal uses RSS as a way to deal with data, and blogs as a framework for
content management, with an underpinning of open-source databases such as
MySQL. There are interactive chat features already integrated into the
system, but developers plan to add more such features in future. "The site
is like a Swiss army knife," adds Sheehan. "Most users can use it, but a lot
of tools may take some explanation, which is one reason for embedding the
instructional videos and help features."

The underlying database structure and service-oriented integration of the
portal was developed by staff programmer-analyst Arindam Ganguly, a recent
UCSD computer science graduate, in collaboration with Calit2's Software &
Systems Architecture & Integration (SAINT) lab, led by CSE professor Ingolf
Krueger. SAINT program analyst Yonghui Chen worked on the KEA key word
extraction, treemapping and some RSS functions, while graduate student To-ju
Huang helped automate the process of information gathering, filtering and
populating.

UCSD vice chancellor for research Art Ellis says that the Calit2 portal will
help the campus position itself as an innovator, especially in front of the
funding agencies that account for the bulk of federal support for research.
"We live in an age where technologies such as databases and visualization
tools are allowing us to track the creation and diffusion of knowledge --
essentially in real time and across the globe," notes Ellis, who joined UC
San Diego last September from the National Science Foundation, where he
directed the agency's Division of Chemistry. "The development of research
intelligence tools is being supported by a variety of federal agencies and
campuses that recognize their potential for managing their investment
portfolios."
 
"Our hope is that in the next four months we will get input from beta users
so we can see how useful the portal is," says Sheehan. At that point, the
developers will decide whether to move into full-scale production. Before
then, they will be closely tracking the number of users who register for the
system and then take the trouble to modify their key research words.

Sheehan's principal message to Calit2 researchers: "The key is your
participation."

Do You Speak Web 2.0?

New Web technologies have triggered an explosion in Internet-related
vocabulary. Following are short descriptions based on definitions posted on
Wikipedia.

Blog. Short for 'web log' - a website where entries are made and displayed
in reverse chronological order, typically providing commentary or news on a
particular subject or from a specific perspective.

Bug box. Website feature that encourages users to submit information on bugs
or glitches in the site's software or tools.

Mashup. Website or web application that combines content from more than one
source.

RSS. Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0) is a web feed format used to
publish frequently updated digital content.

Social bookmarking. User-stored lists of Internet resources that are
available to a network through user-defined keywords (tags). Services such
as del.icio.us and Connotea also offer rating, commenting, citations,
reviews web annotation and other innovations.

Social networks. Virtual online communities - such as MySpace and Facebook -
which grow as newcomers invite their own personal network contacts to join;
large organizations are creating private social networks, known as
Enterprise Relationship Management.


Tags. A type of metadata involving the association of descriptors with
objects; frequently appear as keywords.

Tag cloud. Visual depiction of content tags used on a website, with more
frequently used tags depicted in a larger font.

Treemap. Interactive method for displaying information about entities with a
hierarchical relationship, in a "space-constrained" environment (e.g., a
computer monitor).

Web 2.0. Second-generation, Web-based communities, tools and services that
facilitate collaboration and sharing among users.


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