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.

BRII Update

This is a short update on our activities and some ideas I have come up with.

Since the end of the BRII project we have been working on the registry and user engagement. We are adding more data continuously. We are also outlining data quality control processes and planning some activities with users to evaluate our work.

Outcomes of our work in BRII gave us some insights into what the requirements for a successful service of the registry would be. For example:

From the departments and individual users point of view:

• Breadth of coverage. By this is meant the inclusion of data from as many different sources as possible, both internally and externally.
• Depth of coverage in addition to breadth of coverage. This will enable context to be clear and detailed questions to be answered. It will require a maximum quantity of data about each entity from multiple sources.
• The ability to find information that cannot be easily found elsewhere such as all Oxford researchers working in a particular topic or collaborating with others in a specific geographical location
• Easy to use and flexible search option on the Blue Pages
• The ability to discover research connections between people and research interests as well as gaps or islands of subjects (groups who are not related to anyone)
• The ability to explore information across time, as in changes in roles, research interests of people, and in their publications,
• Being able to download relevant information in formats that can be easily manipulated by users.

From the University point of view:

• To provide services complementary to those provided by other systems (avoid duplication)
• the ease with which data harvesting can be repeated and supported in future will be critical in the long-term to delivering a lower overhead and a sustainable/affordable service.

We are working on implementing and providing the above requisites. However this could take some time during which we need to constantly monitor response from our users to see if we are in track.

During the last few weeks I have been reading about privacy and data aggregation issues. Both topics are extremely relevant to BRII. Regarding privacy, I like this quote by boyd (2010):

"Fundamentally, privacy is about having control over how information flows. It's about being able to understand the social setting in order to behave appropriately. To do so, people must trust their interpretation of the context, including the people in the room and the architecture that defines the setting."

If I translate the above to the context of the registry and the Blue Pages, I would say that in order for researchers and departments to trust our work we need to help them understand what we are doing with their information and in which contexts we are going to disseminate it. Although we are not dealing with personal information, we are using information about researchers' work (which sometimes they want to be private), information which can affect (hopefuly positively) their reputations and future work.

Regarding data aggregatiojn, the general concerns I gather from the literature can be summarized as: data aggregation can threaten privacy, can lead to security problems (e.g., identity theft), can mislead people (aggregated data is not always comprehensible), can violate contextual integrity (changing data’s original meaning) and is not always used for the same purposes as originally intended.

Having the above in mind and putting that into BRII’s context: data restricted to one institution and limited to data about research, this reading has left me thinking on more requisites we may need to consider in our work. The diagram below explains what I am talking about.

Click to see larger version

It is about building trust among our users. It complements the first list which is more focused on technical developments and data access and coverage. This second set of points, I think, would help our contributors as well as users of data. It will let them know in which ways we are going to use their information and in which ways we are allowing other parties use that data. We need to reassure our contributors that their data will be secured and used lawfully, by constraining uses to research purposes and keeping data’s contextual integrity. We have already been taking into account some of this points but we may need to stress them and publicise them more.

Relevant literature:
Ethics of data mining and aggregation
Data aggregation: Actually a threat?
Lita van Wel and Lamber Royakkers (2004) Ethical issues in web data mining. Ethics and Information Technology 6: 129–140
Nissenbaum, (1997) “Toward an approach to privacy in public: the challenges of information technology,” Ethics and Behavior 7(3) , pp. 207–219.
Nissenbaum, H. (1998), “Protecting Privacy in an Information Age: The Problem of Privacy in Public,” Law and Philosophy, 17, pp. 559-596.

End of Project

The BRII project has officially concluded. However development and user engagement work are still ongoing. We will continue to add data to the registry and go around the Univeristy selling our outputs and asking people for more feedback. We will keep you updated on our progress here and in our website http://brii.bodleian.ox.ac.uk

If you want to know more about our outputs and outcomes, have a look at the "BRII Papers, Reports and Presentations" section in the right-hand side column of this blog.

If you would like more information email me at: cecilia.loureiro-koechlin@bodleain.ox.ac.uk or ring me at +44 (0)1865 280028 or Sally Rumsey (BRII Manager) at e: sally.rumsey@bodleian.ox.ac.uk tel: +44 (0) 1865 283860.

Blue Pages video clip

As the project will end soon (31st of March) I wanted to show you what we have done so far with the Blue Pages. We will not stop working though. We will continue working on harvesting more data and user engagement. Anusha and Mat have been working tirelessly on the Blue Pages and although there is still a lot of work to be done on it I think it is at a stage where I can show you a short demo. This is a work in progress video and we are using a few sets of harvested data. The video below lasts 3:14 minutes and has no audio.



Open wmv version on a separate window.

BRII Presentation

On Friday 5th of March I attended a book launch at the University of Hull - Business School. The book is titled "Supporting research students" by Dr Barbara Allan.

"The importance of supporting the needs of research students has recently risen higher up the academic agenda around the world. Numbers of postgraduate students have expanded, and the traditional PhD has now been joined by a new range of doctoral qualifications including professional doctorates. These developments have led to a more diverse student body which now includes senior professional practitioners. This shift has been accompanied by a recognition that universities must encourage library and information staff to make their critical contribution to students' research skill. This timely book offers guidance to enable them to support the specialist needs of these students."

The event was launched by Biddy Fisher, President of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals and Emeritus Professor Patsy Cullen, Board Member of the Museum, Libraries and Archives Council.


During the event Dr Allan presented her current project called the Graduate Virtual Research Environment, an online environment inviting Phd students and research staff in the Business School to share and learn from each others experiences. Then Dr Chris Thomson ran a demo of the environment. He writes a blog here.

After their presentation I gave a short talk about BRII. I talked about the entity registry trying not to use too technical language ;) and about how Research Activity Data (RAD) can be used in the Blue Pages, to design websites, in ORA, etc. I made emphasis on how RAD can complement research students' learning by providing overviews of what experts are doing in their fields of research. Here you have my presentation.