Knowledge Media Institute The Open University, UK http://kmi.open.ac.uk
PhD Studentship - to start October 2001 http://kmi.open.ac.uk/studentships *** Application deadline: May 31 2001 *** Dear Colleagues, Applications are invited from candidates interested in pursuing a PhD on collaborative internet technologies to support scholarly analysis (including Open Archives): * Internet Tools for Scholarly Publishing and Peer Review Another closely related project may also be of interest: * Modelling and Visualizing Research Literatures over the Internet Please follow the application procedure specified on the Studentship page: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/studentships Applicants are encouraged to contact me informally to discuss their ideas before submitting a proposal. Regards, Simon Buckingham Shum ........................................................................... Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) KMi is a highly successful, rapidly expanding interdisciplinary laboratory founded at The Open University in 1995, and located in attractive new offices at The Open University's main campus in Milton Keynes, UK. KMi undertakes high-profile advanced research and development in Knowledge Media: the convergence of knowledge, communication and computing technologies. We offer a stimulating and well-endowed research environment, widely acknowledged to be at the leading edge of European research and development, particularly in new technologies for knowledge modelling and management, open supported learning, and synchronous and asynchronous group working. Our PhD development programme combines the best of European and US models, and you will be joining an active PhD community. The style, impact and content of our work are described in detail in our Web pages at http://kmi.open.ac.uk/. ........................................................................... PhD Studentships Internet Tools for Scholarly Publishing and Peer Review Dr Simon Buckingham Shum and Dr Stuart Watt The Challenge: Designing and evaluating next generation scholarly peer review tools in the age of internet publishing The successful candidate for this PhD will join an innovative project investigating new forms of scientific/scholarly publishing and peer review for the internet. Technologies for scholarly interpretational spaces A key problem we are working on in KMi is how to extend the Net beyond being a vast document library by adding interpretational spaces - technology mediated forums for interpreting, making sense, critiquing, debating, making new connections Meaning arises from perspectives, which make new connections. How can technologies like open hypertext, annotation, discussion/argumentation systems, ontologies, text analysis and visualizations of documents and associated concepts help the interpretation of resources in the library. In sum, without interpretation, there is no meaning or significance, and we are left drowning in the information flood. We want to provide computational support for interpretation. KMi is interested in implementing interpretational spaces for researchers to analyse documents. Background to KMi systems JIME: E-journal peer review. The Journal of Interactive Media in Education (JIME) is a peer reviewed, electronic journal (ejournal), published since 1996, to promote interdisciplinary dialogue through the use of a Web-based peer review process. JIME articles are published in a purpose-designed Web document-discussion user interface, which tightly links the article to an area for review comments and discussion. Reviewers can post comments under threads based on the journal's review criteria (e.g. Originality of Ideas), or they can make section-specific comments. The review process is designed to enable authors, reviewers and the wider community engage in constructive discussion as opposed to the conventional anonymous 'issuing of a verdict'. Authors have the right of reply, and reviewers (non-anonymous) are accountable for what they say. This intellectual history is preserved with the final publication in the form of an edited version with the most significant comments and replies, which remains an open forum for authors (e.g. to post updates) and readers to comment. <http://www-jime.open.ac.uk> D3E web document discussion infrastructure. There are hundreds of links in a given article, which are generated by a Web publishing toolkit called D3E (Digital Document Discourse Environment). D3E has found many applications beyond JIME, is under development on an open source basis, and is in use by a variety of groups. <http://d3e.open.ac.uk> Open Archives Eprint Servers. A promising platform for delivering these services to the widest possible community is the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), specifically, their Eprint server software. The Open Archives Initiative <http://www.openarchives.org> has developed a protocol to enable researchers to search for scholarly documents over multiple ePrint servers. The Eprints server 'shell' that enables a knowledge community to self-archive their documents is now freely available <http://www.eprints.org>. The basis for providing third-party services on top of the eprint server data is outlined in the report of the first prototype implementation <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february00/vandesompel-ups/02vandesompel-ups.html> PhD focus The goal of the PhD will be to survey the range of proposed models for scholarly publishing and peer review on the internet, and in the light of this analysis, to implement and evaluate an environment that could support research comunities. OAI and D3E are prime candidates, given KMi's experience with them, but the strategy taken will clearly have to take into account the rapid technical developments that characterise internet and knowledge-based publishing. Applicants should be able to demonstrate that they can work with relevant web server technologies and standards. OAI servers ar implemented in Perl and MySQL on Linux/Unix servers. The D3E toolkit generates files for D3E-Phorum a customization of the PHP-based Phorum system. However, the ideal candidate will also have experience, or a strong interest, in the social dimensions that ultimately will make or break tools to support publishing and discourse in scholarly research. Relevant publications: Applicants will be expected to have formed ideas based on examining JIME and associated papers <http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/about.html#reading>, and OAI and Eprint documents. Supervision: This studentship will be jointly supervised by Dr Simon Buckingham Shum and Dr Stuart Watt. Dr Buckingham Shum has expertise in fields of HCI, design rationale, graphical argumentation and electronic journals. Dr Watt has expertise in software agents for online communities, knowledge modelling and management, and the teaching of cognitive modelling. We encourage informal enquiries from prospective students who want to discuss ideas. Additional Information: * KMI Website: http://kmi.open.ac.uk * KMI's Studentship Website: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/studentships/ * Simon Buckingham Shum: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/sbs/ (email: s.buckingham.s...@open.ac.uk, tel: 01908 655723) * Stuart Watt: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/snw2/ (email: s.n.k.w...@open.ac.uk, tel: 01908 654513) ........................................................................... Modelling and Visualizing Research Literatures over the Internet Dr Simon Buckingham Shum and Dr John Domingue The Challenge: Providing researchers with next generation tools for tracking and analysing research concepts The successful candidate for this PhD will join a dynamic team working on the Scholarly Ontologies digital library project [http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/scholonto]. There are several possible kinds of research that could be conducted, depending on your background and interests. Suitable backgrounds would include Hypertext (semantic systems; open hypermedia), HCI (information visualization; usability studies), CSCW (collaborative construction of shared information spaces; classification theory/boundary objects), AI (ontologies; knowledge modelling), Digital Libraries (document semantics; DL user interfaces; RDF/metadata) and Computer Science (information extraction; Java/web user interfaces; web databases). Some example PhDs might focus on: * Understanding how researchers conceptualise their fields, and research literatures * Designing and evaluating visualizations and other advanced services * Implementing information extraction technologies to identify scholarly claims in documents, in order to seed a knowledge base Relevant publications: Applicants will be expected to have formed ideas based on papers on the Scholarly Ontologies Project website Supervision: The above 2 projects will be jointly supervised by Dr Simon Buckingham Shum and Dr John Domingue. Dr Buckingham Shum has expertise in fields of human-computer interaction, design rationale, graphical argumentation and electronic journals. Dr Domingue has expertise in human-computer interaction, information visualization, and knowledge engineering, specifically collaborative, web-based ontology construction. Additional Information: * KMI Website: http://kmi.open.ac.uk * KMI's Studentship Website: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/studentships/ provides links to * KMI studentship policy * KMI studentship FAQs * OU Research Degrees Prospectus * OU Application Form * Writing KMi PhD Proposals * Simon Buckingham Shum: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/sbs/ (email: s.buckingham.s...@open.ac.uk, tel: 01908 655723) * John Domingue: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/domingue/ (email: j.b.domin...@open.ac.uk, tel: 01908 655014) ........................................................................... -- ¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬ Dr Simon Buckingham Shum mailto:s...@acm.org Knowledge Media Institute http://kmi.open.ac.uk/sbs The Open University Tel: +44 (0)1908-655723 Milton Keynes Fax: +44 (0)1908-653169 [office] MK7 6AA, UK eFax: +44 (0)870-122-8765 [direct] ¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬ Jnl. Interactive Media in Education: http://www-jime.open.ac.uk "What gets measured is not always important, and what is important cannot always be measured" A. Einstein "Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens" J. Hendrix
