Research: Publications

Article for "European Information" the journal of the European Information Association

DESIRE: Helping researchers in Europe to get more from the Web

How can we make the World Wide Web (WWW) a better tool for supporting the work of the research community in Europe? This is the question that the DESIRE project has been tackling since 1995, through the development of new Internet technologies and new online information services.

DESIRE is a large project funded by the European Union under the Telematics Application Programme. Now in its second phase, it involves a team of researchers from four countries - The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the UK, working at ten institutions ranging from libraries to universities to the providers of national research networks.

The project recognises the fact that researchers were one of the first communities to make use of the WWW in their work. The Web is used as an information medium - for publishing and disseminating research data and for locating information to support further research. It is also used as a communication medium – for the discussion of research issues, both within projects and in the wider arena.

The Web is still a bit of a building site, with even the basic architecture still in the design phase. Many people and many organisations are still trying to establish the best way to work with the Web medium. DESIRE has been conducting research and development to make the Web a better environment for researchers. The project has worked on ways to help the research community to deal with information on the Web in terms of:

• finding it
• fetching it
• trusting it
• sharing it

Some DESIRE work has resulted in the development of public services on the WWW, other work has been behind the scenes, focussing on new Web architectures and Internet technologies to support Web users, even though they may be unaware of this support!

Finding it

How can we help researchers to find information on the WWW that is appropriate for their work?

The most popular search tools on the Internet, such as AltaVista and Yahoo, provide invaluable help in sifting through the ever-growing mass of online information. However, these services aim to serve the wider public and are too indiscriminate for many professional information users.

DESIRE has looked at ways of developing more effective ways for researchers to locate high quality resources on the WWW.

Behind the Scenes

Behind the scenes DESIRE has been working closely with the developers of the World Wide Web (The World Wide Web Consortium or W3C) on ways of improving the architecture of the Web so that a standard method of describing Internet resources can be developed. The result has been the Resource Description Framework (RDF) which was accepted at the W3C conference this year as an agreed international metadata standard. RDF will have a major impact on the way that the Web develops – allowing different organisations, such as libraries, Web publishers, governments and companies to make information published on the Web easier to access.

Public services

Another solution has been the development of information gateways the Internet equivalent of a research library – offering access to carefully selected collections of Internet resources that have been chosen with the specific needs of researchers in mind. Information gateways offer users an online catalogue of Internet sites, where each site has been selected and described by a librarian or subject expert and classified under a subject heading. DESIRE has produced tools and methods to support libraries and organisations wishing to set up gateways on the Internet, notably "The DESIRE Information Gateways Handbook" which points to the work that has been done on selection, classification, cataloguing and description of Internet resources.

A number of Internet subject gateways have been developed in Europe:

United Kingdom – The Resource Discovery Network

In the UK a number of subject gateways are being funded by the UK government’s Higher Education Funding Council and are organised under the Resource Discovery Network (RDN) . All the UK gateways are based in UK universities and involve input from librarians and information professionals. The RDN gateways include:

• SOSIG (social science, business and law)
• EMC (engineering, mathematics and computing, which includes EEVL)
• BIOME (biological sciences, which includes OMNI)
• HUMBUL (humanities)

The Netherlands - DutchESS

The National Library of the Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek) has built a national subject gateway covering all subjects, called DutchESS (Dutch Electronic Subject Service). This has been built with co-operation from library staff at seven universities across The Netherlands.

Finland – The Finnish Virtual Library Project

In Finland the government’s Ministry of Education has funded the large-scale development of national subject gateways. The Finnish Virtual Library project was launched in 1995 and involves collaborative work between eight university libraries in Finland.

Sweden - EELS

EELS is based at The University of Lund and covers the broad subject area of Electronic Engineering. It is a cooperative project of the six Swedish University of Technology Libraries.

Denmark (and other Nordic Countries) - NOVAGate

NOVAGate covers forestry, veterinary, agricultural, food and environmental sciences and is produced by the libraries of the NOVA University in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.

Other gateway developments

DESIRE is supporting the development of new subject gateways across Europe. In September 1999 a workshop is being held for 18 National Libraries in Europe to discuss gateway developments. Many libraries are in the process of working out how they will manage Internet resources alongside their traditional collections and there is a need for agreed methods and standards for doing this.

Fetching it

How can we improve Internet access and download times for researchers? Efficient search tools can help people find the information they need more quickly, but that might not be much help if they then have to wait forever to download it.

There has been an enormous growth of traffic demand on local, national and international network backbones, far exceeding the rate at which additional bandwidth can reasonably be provided, meaning that researchers are increasingly experiencing a World-Wide Wait!

Behind the scenes

DESIRE has been working on caching as a solution to this problem. Caching is just a way of making sure that copies of frequently-consulted Web documents are kept close to the people who use them. So instead of having to retrieve the information from the other side of the world it could be available in the same building. It's all automatic, so users don't have to keep track of where the copies are located, they just see faster access times, their network managers see less traffic and Web servers see lower request rates.

Caches can typically speed information retrieval by a factor of 10 and reduce total web traffic by up to 50%, saving both time and money.

Local caching services are already in widespread use. DESIRE is taking the idea one step further and building a network of interconnected caches which serve local, regional, national and international users, with the ultimate aim of being able to provide a co-ordinated service across the research networks of Europe. There are already inter-linked national caching systems in Norway and The Netherlands and the DESIRE mesh is spreading across Europe.

Public services

DESIRE has offered methods, tools and support for the people running the national research networks in Europe who are interested in joining a caching mesh.

Trusting it

How can we help researchers to find information they can trust on the Internet?

The quality of information available over Internet is often not as high as researchers might hope for. Anyone can publish anything on the Internet and so academic journals sit next to comics and presidential speeches next to idle gossip. Internet resources are volatile and can change in quantity or quality at any moment. The resources are not always user-friendly – so accessibility and usability may vary considerably. Researchers need to be careful that they don’t degrade their work by using poor quality information or data. But who do they trust and how can they pin point the high quality information amid the morass?

Public services

DESIRE has approached this problem in a number of ways. On the one hand it can help to educate people about the problem of information quality on the Internet and to teach them skills to evaluate quality for themselves.

Internet Detective is an online tutorial that aims to do just this. It’s free to access over the WWW and has proved enormously popular in universities, libraries and many other institutions. Many lecturers and teachers have incorporated this DESIRE tutorial into their curriculum and so people are increasingly aware of the things they can do to evaluate Internet resources.

DESIRE has also investigated the potential for third-party review of Internet resources so that researchers know that an Internet resource has a "stamp of approval", which means the information is trustworthy.

One way to do this has been to encourage more librarians and subject specialists to work at building the subject gateways described earlier. Researchers know that any resources they access via a subject gateway has been evaluated and selected by a subject expert. DESIRE has devised ways of involving the teams of subject experts and librarians to work collaboratively at building subject gateways. It is now possible for distributed teams to add resources to a gateway remotely from any networked PC, meaning that gateways can be built by the nation’s experts with each of them working from their normal place of work.

Behind the scenes

Web technologies also offer the potential for automated solutions to identifying what can and cannot be trusted. For example, it might be valuable to store some indication of quality in the metadata relating to an Internet resource. The DESIRE work on RDF enables people to create a metadata vocabulary to describe quality. This supports search and retrieval based on quality criteria.

Imagine the scenario where you could order your search results so that the ones that met the quality criteria most important to you were displayed first. For example, perhaps you are only interested in peer reviewed scholarly journals. A prototype has been built that allows this to happen. The results of an Internet search are ranked automatically according to algorithms based on quality criteria.

DESIRE has also been experimenting with a system where people can share their Bookmark of Favourites files. Imagine being able to access the Web sites that a highly esteemed professor has listed in her personal bookmark files. The fact that she bookmarked them might indicate a certain level of quality. At the moment we all have our bookmarks sitting on our machines, but if researchers could share their bookmarks and see what others were recommending this could be useful. DESIRE is working on a prototype system for sharing recommendations and for allowing people to see how others are rating particular Internet sites.

Sharing it

The Internet is all about sharing and collaboration and DESIRE aims to help researchers and those supporting the research community to do this.

The project has produced materials for end-users, libraries, network service providers and others and all the work is freely available from the DESIRE Web site.

Summing it up!

DESIRE is a complex project involving research and development in a number of fields. It has produced tools and methods to support different user groups, notably the international Web community, national libraries, and national research network providers. However, what all of the work has in common is that it helps researchers in Europe to get more from the Web.