1,720,983 research outputs found
Richtags: Cross Repository Browsing
No full textrichtags allows you to search across multiple repositories from numerous institutions covering hundreds of disciplines for research that is of interest to you
MusicNet: aligning musicology's metadata
No full textAs more resources are published as Linked Data, data from multiple heterogeneous sources should be more rapidly discoverable and automatically integrable, enabling it to be reused in contexts beyond those originally envisaged. But Linked Data is not of itself a complete solution. One of the key challenges of Linked Data is that its strength is also a weakness: anyone can publish anything. So in music, for instance, 17 sources may independently publish data about 'Schubert', but there is no de facto way to know that any of these Schuberts are the same, because the sources are not aligned. Alignment is a prerequisite for usable Linked Data, without which resources are effectively be stranded rather than integrated. To begin to address this, the MusicNet project has minted URIs for composers and exposed as RDF basic biographical data to aid disambiguation, and, crucially, alignment information for several leading providers of musicological dat
Introducing musicSpace
No full textMusicologists consult a wide variety of data sources in their research, many of which are now available online. However, the segregation of data into numerous discrete repositories, inadequate metadata, insufficient data/search granularity, and poor search UIs are all barriers to the intelligent manipulation of metadata. This means that research questions requiring advanced cross-source filtering on metadata fields or the running of complex multipart search queries have to date been effectively intractable. The experimental ‘musicSpace’ project seeks to enable such questions by integrating access to leading musicological data sources via a faceted browser and by enriching the metadata of our data providers
Findings and outcomes of the musicSpace project
No full textThe effective use of the ever-increasing number of online music and musicology resources is held back by the segregation of data into a plethora of discrete and disparate databases, and the use of legacy, ad hoc or otherwise unsuitable metadata specifications, such that many real-world research questions are rendered effectively intractable. To counter this barrier to research, the "musicSpace" project (based at the University of Southampton, UK) utilized Semantic Web and Web2.0 technologies such as RDF and AJAX to experimentally integrate access to many of musicology's leading data providers, by: (1) designing back-end services to integrate (and where necessary surface) available (meta)data for exploratory search from musicology's key online data providers; and (2) providing a front-end interface, based on the "mSpace" faceted browser, to support rich exploratory search interaction. The project concluded with a longitudinal evaluation of the efficacy of the musicSpace interface in supporting researchers, and in this paper we present our finding. Our work offers an effective generalizable framework for data integration and exploration that is well suited to arts and humanities data, and we conclude by outlining how we are taking various aspects of this work forward
Rich Tags: Cross-Repository Browsing
No full textWe present RichTags, a system for cross-site browsing and exploration of digital repositories. Categorical and faceted search across repositories is poorly supported, especially compared to the support of keyword search through internet search engines. We combine a variety of information retrieval techniques to determine categories of papers, to enable cross-repository browsing by category. The browsing and exploration of this metadata is achieved through a multi-faceted dynamic exploration interface. Social interaction features have also been added to enable cross-repository tagging, commenting and sharing of papers into groups. These social features are available via an API to enable future work to add plugins to pull comments back to the repositories
MusicSpace: improving access to musicological data
No full textEfforts over the past decade to digitize scholarly musicological materials has revolutionized the research process, however online research in musicology is now held back by the segregation of data into a plethora of discrete and disparate databases, and the use of legacy or ad hoc metadata specifications that are unsuited to modern demands. Many real-world musicological research questions are rendered effectively intractable because there is insufficient metadata or metadata granularity, and a lack of data source integration. The "musicSpace" project has taken a dual approach to solving this problem: designing back-end services to integrate (and where necessary surface) available (meta)data for exploratory search from musicology's key online data providers; and providing a front-end interface, based on the "mSpace" faceted browser, to support rich exploratory search interaction. We unify our partners' data using a multi-level metadata hierarchy and a common ontology. By using RDF for this, we make use of the many benefits of Semantic Web technologies, such as the facility to create multiple files of RDF at different times and using different tools, assert them into a single graph of a knowledge base, and query all of the asserted files as a whole. In many cases we were able to directly map a record field from a partner's dataset to our combined type hierarchy, but in other cases some light syntactic and/or semantic analysis needed to be performed. This small amount of work in the pre-processing stage adds granularity that significantly enriches the data, allowing for more refined filtering and browsing of records via the search UI. Significantly, although all the data we extract is present in the original records, much of it is neither exposed to nor exploitable by the end-user via our data providers' existing UIs. In musicSpace, however, all data surfaced can be used by the musicologist for the purposes of querying the dataset, and can thus aid the process of knowledge discovery and creation. Our work offers an effective generalizable framework for data integration and exploration that is well suited for Arts and Humanities data. Our benchmarks have been (1) to make tractable previously intractable queries, and thereby (2) to accelerate knowledge discovery
The MusicNet composer URI project
No full textIn any domain, a key activity of researchers is to search for and synthesize data from multiple sources in order to create new knowledge. In many cases this process is laborious, to the point of making certain questions effectively intractable because the cost of the searches outstrip the time available to complete the research. As more resources are published as Linked Data, and with the development of appropriate tools, data from multiple heterogeneous sources should be more rapidly discoverable and automatically integrable, enabling previously intractable queries to be explored, and standard queries to be significantly accelerated for more rapid knowledge discovery. But Linked Data is not of itself a complete solution. One of the key challenges of Linked Data is that its strength is also a weakness: anyone can publish anything. So in classical music, for instance, 17 sources may publish data about „Schubert?, but there is no de facto way to know that any of these Schuberts are one and the same, because the sources are not aligned. Without alignment, much of the benefit of Linked Data is diminished: resources can effectively be stranded rather than discovered, or tangled nets of only guessed at associations can cost more time than they are worth to determine whether a particular dataset is relevant or not
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