New software set to revolutionise internet research
A piece of software developed in partnership with the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield looks set to overcome the problem of information over-load when searching the internet, and will soon be available to researchers throughout the Higher Education community and beyond.
The project is a collaboration between Professor Bob Shoemaker of the University of Sheffield, Tim Hitchcock of the University of Hertfordshire, the humanities informatics team at Sheffield's Humanities Research Institute (HRI) and a serious games company, PlayGen Limited, who are providing additional programming support as part of an ongoing knowledge exchange relationship between the company and the HRI.
The project team are developing a Mozilla Firefox extension called Scrutiny, which will be able to scan web pages selected by individual users and highlight entities that it thinks will interest them. Its primary purpose is to increase the speed and efficiency with which researchers are able to locate potentially relevant information within large data objects such as journal articles or full-text datasets, thereby directly addressing the conundrum of information overload and improving research productivity as a consequence.
A key problem for content repositories is that the interfaces they rely on tend to be generic, inflexible and limited in their ability to provide personalised search results to meet the specific needs of individual researchers. Until now there has been little attempt to personalise search results in order to meet the needs and interests of the end user.
However, the modern information environment places new pressures on research communities. Users are required to explore and absorb an ever-increasing body of relevant research data both quickly and effectively. This is particularly important when dealing with documents such as journal articles whose relevance is perhaps tangential to the main topic of research, or highly complex data such as entries within a legal document in which relevant information is hidden within wordy and jargon-ridden texts.
Michael Pidd, HRI Digital Manager, explains: "Content repositories still leave the end user to read, skim-read or keyword-search entire documents in order to locate specific information. Scrutiny, on the other hand, is able to scan a web page and identify areas which are likely to be relevant to the user's specific research interests. After it has explored a document and identified entities which it believes to be of interest, the user will be prompted to accept or discard its suggestions, thereby training it further and personalising its rule system to produce results ever closer to the researcher's specific interests".
In this way users will be able to refine Scrutiny's understanding of their personal interests through an iterative process of accepting or discarding the suggestions which Scrutiny presents. Scrutiny will be available to download for free from the project blog, SourceForge.net and from Mozilla's add-on repository. All source code and documentation will be released as open source for further refinement and enhancement by the developer community. Says Michael Pidd: "As the internet continues to grow, resources such as Scrutiny which can provide researchers with a fast, efficient and increasingly accurate method of retrieving information will become ever more essential".
For further information, please contact Michael Pidd at:
Tel: 0114 222 6116
email : m.pidd@sheffield.ac.uk
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