Advanced end-user functionalities

Researchers need advanced functionalities in order to explore the content and advanced data services provided by the underlying layers of DRIVER. Their main goal is to extract scientific information presented in publications and also in other types or formats of data used within their scientific community. To achieve this, they need to use advanced search and browsing tools over the heterogeneous data representing cross-subject repositories stored as DRIVER Objects. Researchers want to view and also be able to define scientific relations among various publications and primary data, i.e. enhanced publications, with the accompanying weighted values these relationships carry within their communities.

The end-user fucntionalities in DRIVER-II are divided into the following tasks:

Search and Browse: new types of searches will be supported based either on the enriched data services (other types of content for non-text publications) or on algorithms for document similarity searches; multi-level browsing mechanisms will be developed and offered for information discovery.

Personalized services: user models will be enhanced due to new types of harvested data and corresponding search types. Semi-automated user profiling techniques will be developed, which will not be based only on user entered preferences, but also on the monitoring of the users activities. Built around the users profiling results, the Community Service will assist in characterizing and determining its overall members’ behaviour. The Recommendation Service will generate real time alerts and recommendations based on the user and community profiles. Also, the corresponding UI-Services will also be enhanced to reflect all the underlying advanced user functionalities and include visual presentations and interaction styles due to the new types of data and formats.

Active Information Discovery: This task realizes a new service which presents the notion of the Enhanced Publication to the users, providing them with an implicit collaboration tool. Relationships between objects can be explicitly collected from external repositories, in which case they are considered true facts and represented by definition throughout the data layer (i.e. they cannot be removed or modified). In addition,  the AID-Service allows community members not only to define new types of relationships to express their specific needs, but also to use these or any existing types of relationships to link sources of data (DRIVER Objects) within the DRIVER-II Information Space. Users can establish new relationships between objects or expand on those created by others; A UI component will provide the necessary navigation tools for this process and will also display all types of relationships (both explicit and user defined) in a ranked order.