Research Officer:
Enhanced Tagging and Terminology Registries (Ref: 07H185A)
UKOLN, University of Bath
Person Specification
Research Officer:
|
|
Job Advertisement | Job Description | Person Specification | About UKOLN
UKOLN has a vacancy for a Research Officer to work in the areas of Enhanced Tagging and Terminology Registries.
UKOLN is a centre of expertise in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information, education and cultural heritage communities by:
UKOLN is based at the University of Bath directed by Dr Liz Lyon and currently has a staff of thirty. UKOLN is funded by the Council for Museums, Libraries & Archives (MLA); the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the funding bodies for higher and further education in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland; as well as by project funding from the JISC, EPSRC and the European Community. UKOLN also receives support from the University of Bath where it is based. More details on UKOLN activities can be found on its website: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
UKOLN aims to inform practice and influence policy in the areas of: digital libraries, metadata and resource discovery, distributed library and information systems, Web technologies and digital preservation and data curation (as a partner in the Digital Curation Centre). It provides network information services, including the Ariadne magazine, and the International Journal of Digital Curation, and runs workshops and conferences.
Under the JISC Capital Programme, UKOLN was successful in securing funding for leading two terminology-related projects. The first of these: the Enhanced Tagging for Discovery Project will demonstrate and evaluate the combination of use of controlled vocabularies and social tagging in the context of repositories and digital collections, attempting to get the best of both worlds. Can vocabulary control and the use of an established classification, such as the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), improve the usability and utility of free tagging for resource discovery and interoperability for general users of an information system? Can the folksonomic tag clouds be seeded with KOS elements, so as to produce a hybrid?
The combined approach could be used at various stages of the metadata creation workflow: - by an author creating original metadata at time of deposit, by a reader annotating (for colleagues/world or for recommendation for inclusion in a collection), by an intermediary or by an automatic process at any stage. The first two options will be examined in this study: the user as author and the user as reader.
The project will investigate deploying demonstrators within two communities of use: at Intute, focusing mainly on tagging by readers (postgraduate users annotating resources with tags); and at STFC, focusing mainly on tagging by authors (when they deposit in the repository). Two different KOS, appropriate to the different use contexts, will be combined with social tagging. The DDC will be employed in context of Intute: Social Sciences. OCLC Research will provide access to terminology resources including the electronic DDC 22 file, with its deep vocabulary content and rich terminology resources of synonyms and mappings. OCLC Research will provide access to Dewey Web Service APIs and will collaborate on their incorporation into the Demonstrator. The PACS (Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme) will be employed at STFC in the context of the ePublication Archive.
The post holder will have responsibility for leading the Work Packages on Requirements Analysis, Dissemination and Project Management. Deliverables will include a Requirements Summary report, Web site development and project management outputs.
This study will analyse issues related to the potential delivery of a Terminology Registry as a shared infrastructure service within the JISC Information Environment (IE). The study will consider how a Registry might support development of terminology and other services within the context of a service-oriented environment. The role of a terminology registry will be considered in relation to other components of the information landscape, in particular with regard to other JISC IE shared infrastructure services, such as the JISC IE metadata registry (IEMSR) and the JISC IE service (and collection) registry (IESR).
In addition the study will draw on experience of the use and development of terminology and ontology registries in other domains, particularly within the e-Learning and e-Science domains, and will draw on experience from international initiatives. The study will describe usage scenarios and use cases, investigate requirements and sustainability, study costs and benefits. It will look at organisational questions such as who is to create, maintain and host the content of the registry and at cooperation with similar registries. Architectural issues will be explored, in particular the potential for co-ordination of registry efforts within the JISC IE and across domains. The scoping study will make recommendations on which JISC can base decisions on future provision of a terminology registry. It is envisaged that the work will inform the development of the Information Environment, the e-Framework and e-Infrastructure initiatives. The project will also contribute to any future JISC strategic development activities.
The post-holder will be responsible for the following:
Reports: the Final Report synthesising the outcomes of the scoping study, which
will be preceded by an Interim Report, Dissemination: the final version of the
scoping study will be published on the various Web sites, Project Management
and partner co-ordination.
The post-holder will require good communications skills, interest and awareness in digital library technical and interoperability issues, and experience across education / cultural communities. The post-holder should be able to demonstrate the following skills and attributes:
Web page content by Shirley
Keane of UKOLN
Page last revised on:
26-Jul-2007
Email comments to the UKOLN web-support team