The 7th International Conference on Open Repositories (OR 2012) has seen last week close to 500 participants, the highest number in its history. The theme and title of OR 2012 in Edinburgh – Open Services for Open Content: Local In for Global Out – reflects the current move towards open content, ‘augmented content’, distributed systems and data delivery infrastructures. A very good fit with what CORE (core.kmi.open.ac.uk) offers.

The CORE system developed in KMi had a very active presence. Petr Knoth has presented different aspects of the CORE system in a presentation, at a poster session (with Owen Stephens) and also during the developers challenge. CORE has been also discussed in a number of presentations by other participants not directly linked to the Open University. Perhaps the most important case being the UK RepositoryNet+ project presentation. UK RepositoryNet+ is a socio-technical infrastructure funded by JISC supporting deposit, curation & exposure of Open Access research literature. UK RepositoryNet+ aims to provide a stable socio-technical infrastructure at the network-level to maximize value to UK HE of that investment by supporting a mix of distributed and centrally delivered service components within pro-active management, operation, support and outcome. While this infrastructure will be designed to meet the needs of UK research, it is set and must operate effectively within a global context. UK RepositoryNet+ considers the CORE system as an important component in this infrastructure. read more...

The last 10 years have seen a massive increase in the amounts of Open Access publications available in journals and institutional repositories. The open presence of large volumes of state-of-the-art knowledge online has the potential to provide huge savings and benefits in many fields. However, in order to fully leverage this knowledge, it is necessary to develop systems that (a) make it easy for users to discover, explore and access this knowledge at the level of individual resources, (b) explore and analyse this knowledge at the level of collections of resources and (c) provide infrastructure and access to raw data in order to lower the barriers to the research and development of systems and services on top of this knowledge. The CORE system is trying to address these issues by providing the necessary infrastructure. read more...

We have recently released a new mobile application for Apple devices. The application entitled CORE Research Mobile is freely available from the iTunes store.

http://itunes.apple.com/lk/app/core-research-mobile/id523562663?mt=8

The release of the application has been independently announced also by Gary Price on infodocket.com .

http://www.infodocket.com/2012/05/09/searchfind-open-access-scholarly-articles-reports-using-new-ios-apps-from-core-project/

Over the last year, we have worked towards increasing the amount of metadata and full-text content in the aggregation and also on improving the updating frequency of the system. However, increasing the volume of content created also a higher demand on the efficiency of processing, maintaining and exposing the content. In the last three months, we have been optimising the CORE system to improve the parallelisation of processes the CORE system performs. These are namely: downloading and parsing large metadata description files, downloading pdf files from multiple sources, converting pdf files to text, extracting citation information from full-texts, recognising citation targets, discovering semantically related resources, indexing. All these processes have been optimised to allow a relatively even distribution of load across many parallel threads. This task was in our view very important and required significant development effort, but was definitely worth it! A typical CORE repository processing activity will be in our hardware environment distributed among 144 threads (24 processors each with 6 cores). The optimised system enables us to continue adding more repositories into the CORE aggregation and will also helps us to keep content in CORE fresh. read more...

Since we first made CORE public, we’ve had a number of repository managers ask if we are harvesting their particular repository data. We’ve also sometimes come across issues harvesting content that we want to feedback to the repository manager (or other relevant staff). In order to be able to answer such questions, and to be transparent about what CORE is doing – what we have harvested, where we have encountered problems etc. we’ve now released a ‘Repository Analytics’ dashboard. read more...

CORE received as part of the release of version 0.7 a brand new design (http://core.kmi.open.ac.uk). The new design should be more user friendly. We have also added more information about CORE on the portal. We hope you will like it!

In the two previous blogs posts in this series (Finding fulltext and What does Google do?) I’ve described some of the challenges related to harvesting metadata and full text from institutional repositories. I’ve omitted some of the technical issues we’ve encountered (e.g. issues with OAI-PMH Resumption Tokens) as generally we’ve been able to work around these – although I may come back to these at some point in the future. Also worth a read is Nick Sheppard’s post on the UKCORR blog touching on some of these issues. read more...