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
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.
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.
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.
The CORE team is organising a workshop collocated with JCDL 2012, a major conference in the field of digital libraries. Our proposal to organise the 1st International Workshop on Mining Scientific Publications was accepted. The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers, digital library developers and practitioners from government and industry to address the current challenges in the field of mining scientific publications and building the necessary infrastructure to support this. The topics of the workshop are directly related to the work carried out in both SreviceCORE and DiggiCORE projects and are available on the workshop website.
This is the second post in a series about the issues CORE has encountered trying to harvest (and build services on) metadata and fulltext items from UK HE research repositories. The first post “Finding fulltext” looked at the problems of harvesting fulltext due to variations in how links are made (or not) from metadata records to fulltext content.
In this post I want to consider the question of what services like CORE are allowed or permitted to do with repository content. A third post will then describe some of the solutions to the various challenges we see.
In order to be able to provide the search functions, similarity measures and other functionality CORE harvests both metadata and fulltext items from repositories. This raises questions about whether we are allowed to harvest metadata or fulltext items, and if so what are we allowed to do with them once we have harvested them. In the first phase of CORE we relied on OAI-PMH to harvest metadata, and then used links from the harvested records to try to discover the related fulltext item.
This is the first in a series of blog posts looking at these issues, the problems we’ve encountered and the solutions we have put in place (so far). In this post I’m going to focus on the question of finding fulltext items from the metadata. This wasn’t always straightforward. Not all repositories link to fulltext records from the metadata in the same way, and in many cases there is no direct link from the metadata to the fulltext reocrds, but rather a link to the repositories webpage for the record, rather than to the full text.
The ServiceCORE team has now moved to an agile development lifecycle with a 2 weeks long release period. What is available in the new release that has just been published?
– A new advanced search facility.
– Search snippets available on the results page. Snippets created from the resource ful-text where available.
– The system supports citation extraction (available for newly processed resources) and displays references mined from the article full-texts. CORE also provides direct links to them, if they are held in our repository – http://core.kmi.open.ac.uk/display/41214)
– A new document preview feature
The ServiceCORE project is addressing a wide range of problems caused by the rapid increase of Open Access scientific papers stored across UK institutional repositories. These problems include:- The difficulty of accessing real, full-text data from these distributed sources efficiently.
The ServiceCORE project is responding to these challenges by developing a nation-wide aggregation service for content stored across UK Open Access Repositories. The CORE system is not only harmonising the access to the UK repository content, but it is also processing the full-text-content using text-mining methods to enrich the existing metadata. This includes extraction of citation information, recommendation of similar content etc.