Building TERENA Academic Portal as a Community Oriented Portal Yuri Demchenko Project Development Officer, TERENA

Video and Streaming over Internet as component Portal Solution REIS Initiative TERENA Academic Portal Initiative/Project –What do people need from Academic Portal? –Academic Portal as community Oriented Portal Visual Information in Education and Research –Cataloguing/Browsing/Searching/Indexing

REIS Initiative (REsearch Indexing Service for Europe) Started from BoF at TNNC’99 –Main goal - to build pilot service for Research and Education community in Europe Specific REIS features –Comprehensive coverage of Research-on-the-web –Both searchable and browsable by subject –Interactive search refinement Finding Authoritative Resources - ”Topic Distillation” –Adaptive crawling and automatic (pre-)classification of gathered data –Attribute (metadata) searching Dublin Core metadata search capability –Multilinguality and cross-language searching Multilingual support in interface

TERENA Academic Portal Initiative/Project (TAP) To supersede REIS –Answer on vital needs of R&A community in specific Information Service Main components –Indexing/Searching tools/engine –Cross-Searching Automatic Indexes and human-made Subject Gateways –Directory services –Video-on-Demand and Streaming (plus hosting) –Content Replication Portal as an access point to all what’s behind the Portal –All what community uses, develops and needs –Multilsite and multihome for services Collaborative vs distributed

Academic Portal goals Community oriented Portal –Binding and assisting specific community –Virtual community with its Knowledge accumulation and domain specific resources Research diversification and knowledge accumulation Assistive services/tools for Researchers and Educators –building authorities in new domains –discovering knowledge/resources in European/worldwide Internet Cooperation with industry –to help research community –to provide feedback and input from research community

What do people need from Academic Portal? Information in specific research area –new and diverse areas not covered by existing classification and Subject Gateways (Virtual) Community interaction –Possibility to talk to expert (become bound into community) –to communicate with people –to find colleagues Video/audio materials –personalised experience Build personal profiles and exchange of experience and findings –Shared bookmark - to accumulate highly professional experience Access to Open Research area –Assistive tools –Automatic classification and knowledge mining

Academic Portal as Community Oriented Portal To build successful Portal you need to find/build proper community –Community membership creates willingness to cooperate in resources and services creation and development Bottom-up vs Top-down approach Possibility to communicate between people (community members) –create cooperative environment –virtual (point of) presence Finding relevant resources in diverse areas Starting with specific area and specific services in general concept Ask and propose to users –user needs driven approach

Academic Portal Value-Added Services Combined with communication between researches –to explore common finding –building virtual community/presence Knowledge Accumulation and Dissemination Quality Information Resources enabled by “web-of-trust” Advertisement from and linkage to the Scientific publishers

Visual Information in Education and Research Conferences video archives vs Conference Proceedings –Q&A – Parallel sessions – (Parallel conferences) Devoted lectures/seminars – Ad Hoc topics –Lectures by expert specialists –Exchange with both teacher and auditorium Distance Education and Training –Courses on demand –Hands-on and practical lessons (e.g., surgery, fiber cabling, etc.) –Virtual classroom Distinctive features –Live video/speech –Information humanisation/impersonalisation –Still paper-like information vs train-of-thought –Virtual presence

Where are we going to go today? Promote use of Video and Streaming services/archives –in knowledge rich/generating areas –Among universities and research institutions –Conferences Extend VoD and Streaming hosting Services –Among NRENs Maintain Directory of available resources –First try in form of List is at –Add index/description –Develop cataloguing/indexing tools for visual/audio information