Title: Comparing and assessing Web 2.0 features in academic publication databases

Proposer: Hans-Wolfgang Loidl

Suggested supervisors: Hans-Wolfgang Loidl

Goal: Comparing and assessing Web 2.0 features in academic publication databases

Description:

Increasingly on-line portals for scientific publication databases, such as CiteSeer and DBLP, use Web 2.0 features in order to enhance the dissemination of research results. These features provide bi-directional communication between author and reader, allowing rapid feedback and ideally engage author and reader in a communication to enhance the publication. Additionally modern portals are moving to a web service approach of getting access to the data-base, which facilitates automatic extraction of customised data from the database.

One such system, used across Scottish universities, is Pure. We currently use PHP scripts to extract customised data from Pure. The goal of this project is to enhance these scripts for better customisation and added functionality. More widely, the features in Pure should be compared and critically evaluated with features provided by other portals such as CiteSeer and DBLP.

The structure of this project will be:

Resources required: PHP, access to Pure, CiteSeer, DBLP

Degree of difficulty: moderate

Background needed: PHP programming skills; basic background on web services and Web 2.0 concepts

References: