Knowledge repositories proliferate at an accelerating rate. While these offer excellent support for specific information searches, there is limited support for unstructured browsing or semi-structured information gathering, when a user does not know what there is to know (but wants to find information connecting known concepts). Students making the transition from School to University often feel swamped by information and need to develop skills in information literacy. There is strong evidence that Wikipedia is a very important source of information for University students (consider the JISC SEEL project), especially in year one. Tools for understanding the structure of information in these large repositories and for conducting semi-structured queries are needed by University students and by the general public.
This project will build a tool for semi-structured searching of knowledge repositories based on finding previously unknown concepts that lie between other concepts. Consider a user who wanted to know about optimisation of crystal structures. A search which looks for concepts which lie between and hence connect “optimisation” and “crystal structure” may turn up previously unknown concepts such as “genetic algorithms” or “space groups” – which would be very difficult to find via conventional approaches to search (which assume that the user has a good understanding of what terms to search for).
This project brings together the School of Computing Information and Media and the Teaching Quality Enhancement Group at the University of Bradford, together with the National Media Museum (based in Bradford). Hence the project has a range of critical friends to increase applicability, take up and longevity of the developed tool.
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