BRII Summer Project

This another update to explain our summer 2010 activities. At BRII we are working on a reporting system where users can notify us and official sources of data about errors they find in Research Activity Data. This system will help us and our sources to improve the quality of data. As we are harvesting data from other sources we are designing a system were users can flag errors and send notifications to the appropriate people (sources and BRII) These notifications will contain enough information to decide on a suitable action to take.

Errors could originate from the content of data themselves or from the process of aggregation we perform at BRII. Say for example, misspellings and wrong information in source data, information which have been aggregated but which belong to different people with the same names, information belonging to the same person but which appears as belonging to two or more people with the same name, etc.

In relation to aggregation errors, Anusha has been working hard to design a system to accurately identify sets of data which belong to the same person. For example Prof John Smith in source 1 and J. P. Smith in source 2 could be the same person, or could not. For this she is using extra information that comes with data such as affiliation etc. When her algorithm is finished we will be able to merge two or more "people" into one or divide one "person" into two or more "people" as requested by administrators or users who identify inaccuracies.

For the summer task we are collaborating with the Computing Laboratory Comlab. Anusha is currently harvesting their data and Monica is working on the reporting/notification forms within the Blue Pages. We will soon contact Comlab again to check their harvested data and participate in tests. We would like to thank Thorsten Hauler, research facilitator, and Edward Crichton, web manager, from Comlab who have kindly given us their time.

This summer project is part of the data quality control that we are trying to establish within the registry. I have talked about this in a previous post.

Advisory Group Meeting

On Friday 2nd of July we will have our first advisory group meeting after the BRII Project ended. The advisory group is comprised of 10 stakeholders from across the University. The purpose of this meeting is to discuss avenues for development of the Entity Registry and related services (i.e. Blue Pages) and strategies for embedding these services within the University. This of course will be a long process and we are just starting. We have good foundations though as the BRII project successfully produced a proof of concept system which is capable of being expanded with services for and information about all University divisions. If you want to have an idea of what we have produced watch our screen cast of the Blue Pages here (wmv file).

BRII at the SCONUL Conference

Yesterday I attended the "Organisational Leadership in a Time of Change" SCONUL Conference at Leeds Queens Hotel. Although I could not stay for the whole event (I stayed only 1 of 3 days) I enjoyed it. I attended a few presentations and presented our BRII poster.

I would like to thank Prof John Lancaster who welcomed me and who kindly helped me to move the BRII poster to a more visible place :)

Sorry for the poor quality pictures, dark place and shaky hands.