Together with our partners, we're investigating new ways to 'mine' the UK's richest information assets.

As institutions confront a massive and ever-increasing body of digital information, Mimas is taking a Meaning Based Computing approach to search and discovery so we can harness the true value of these knowledge assets for research and teaching.

Information proliferation

Many organisations are tasked with managing an exponential growth in research information. However, an incomprehensible amount of untapped information resides in silos across the UK – and much of this information is unstructured or has poor or limited associated metadata.

Traditionally, metadata has supported search and discovery and will continue to do so in critical ways. But as the mass of unstructured data grows and the costs of manual metadata creation are questioned, we need to find alternative, complementary solutions that facilitate efficient and effective search and discovery.

Our challenge is to successfully leverage assets, bring them to researchers in meaningful ways, and demonstrably fuel the UK knowledge economy.

Mimas' Vic Lyte explains further:

"We're exploring techniques that offer ways to surface potentially hidden research material, especially content that lacks metadata. If we're going to make this content available for researchers and educators, we need to adopt a semantic search strategy."

A meaning-based approach for a 'knowledge society'

This challenge is our opportunity to provide users with a superior search experience – one that is more contextually meaningful and richer in possibility. We're working with JISC, JISC Collections, the British Library and Autonomy to find new ways of supporting conceptual browsing across diverse bodies of information.

Our vision is that researchers will use Mimas services to discover and retrieve conceptually and contextually-relevant information, uncovering patterns and relationships between disparate sets of content.

In the sciences, this may span journal articles, white papers and extant materials – and, in the humanities, users will be able to search across archives and manuscripts, image collections and digitised books.

As a result of the pedagogical emphasis on enquiry-based (or student-centred) learning in Higher Education, independent research at the undergraduate level is fast becoming the norm. That's why we feel it's important to build services that encourage this work and remove the barriers to information retrieval – with further emphasis on honing research and information skills.

"…we are all researchers now…"

"In a 'knowledge society' all students – certainly all graduates – have to be researchers. Not only are they engaged in the production of knowledge; they must also be educated to cope with the risks and uncertainties generated by the advance of science."

[From the article A lot to learn by Peter Scott (The Guardian, 08 Jan 2002)]

In this knowledge-based society, graduates increasingly need core skills in managing, synthesising and deploying subject-based knowledge to solve real-world problems. And, to increase their competitive advantage, academics are required to produce more quality and ground-breaking research in less time.

That's where Mimas and our services come in. We want to help users efficiently leverage the wealth of information available to them for research, learning and teaching.

And by deploying powerful technologies – and developing rich applications on top of these assets – we can help considerably speed up the early stages of the research cycle.

Benefits to users

Our users will benefit by being able to:

• explore concepts across disciplines and media types
• discover new relationships and ideas
• speed up the early, labour-intensive stages of research
• spend more time researching, less time searching

Our work

We're working with JISC Collections on the Historic Books Platform where we'll be using Autonomy IDOL, a world-leading platform that provides semantic search and pattern-matching capability of all full-text content and visual media. Users will be able to dig deeper into the content to find undiscovered historical or thematic relationships across Early English, 18th and 19th Century texts.

Other similar work includes the JISC eJournal Archive and the UK Institutional Repository Search demonstrator.

The eJournal Archive will bring together the journal archives from Oxford University Press, Institute of Civil Engineers, Institute of Physics, and Royal Society of Chemistry in a single interface – empowering users to cross-search some 4 million articles with one simple tool. Again, Autonomy IDOL will be deployed to generate more sophisticated and contextually meaningful results.

Key features that will be available to users:

• cluster search results around related conceptual themes
• full-text indexing of documents and associated materials
• text-mining of full-text documents
• dynamic clustering and serendipitous browsing
• visualisation approaches to search results

Working with Mimas

As we embark on this new phase of application development, we're eager to find new partners for collaboration. Here's some of what we can offer:

• consultation, advice and bespoke deployments of meaning-based computing solutions using Autonomy IDOL
• applications development, in-house or with external partners
• an understanding of the complex needs of academic users of all levels
• an understanding of current and emerging standards

If you have a project or idea that you'd like to discuss with us, please get in touch.