The article describing the motivation and case for CORE has been published today in the D-Lib Magazine: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november12/knoth/11knoth.html
Final blog post
The main idea of this blog post is to provide a summary of the CORE outputs produced over the last 9 months and report the lessons learned.
Outputs
The outputs can be divided into (a) technical, (b) content and service and (c) dissemination outputs.
(a) Technical outputs
According to our project management software, to this day, we have resolved 214 issues. Each issue corresponds to a new function or a fixed bug. In this section we will describe the new features and improvements we have developed. The technology on which the system is built has been decribed in our previous blog post.
Technical Approach
In the last six months, CORE has made a huge step forward in terms of the technology solution. According to our project management software, to this day, we have resolved 214 issues. Each issue corresponds to a new function or a fixed bug.
The idea of this blog post is to provide an overview of the technologies and standards CORE is using and to report on the experience we had with them during the development of CORE in the last months. We will provide more information about the new features and enhancements in the following blog posts.
CORE Fight for Open Access in Scotland!
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.
Users and use cases
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.
CORE Plugin integrated in the ULCC system
The University of London Computer Centre is now using the CORE Plugin for cross-repository recommendation of similar documents.
http://pubs.ulcc.ac.uk/80/
Yes, we can! – The CORE team organises a workshop at JCDL 2012 in Washington, DC
KMI and the European Library/Europeana jointly organised the 1st International Workshop on Mining Scientific Publications associated with JCDL 2012 – the most prestigious conference in the world of digital libraries. The workshop was attended by major players in the field including the National Library of Medicine, Library of Congress, CiteSeerX, Elsevier and British Library. Although Barack in the end didn’t come, the workshop was very successful, the only problem being the lack of chairs in the room. We (the workshop organisers – Petr Knoth, KMi; Zdenek Zdrahal, KMI and Andreas Juffinger, The European Library/Europeana) were motivated by the positive response of the community to the importance of issues researchers face when mining research publications to improve the way research is carried out and evaluated.
Aggregating and Enriching Content to support Open Access presentation
CORE releases a mobile application for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch
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 .
Search/Find Open Access Scholarly Articles, Reports Using New iOS Apps from CORE Project
Multithreading support in CORE
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.