Dr Thanassis Tiropanis and Prof Hugh Davis of the ECS Learning Societies Lab and Dr Patrick Carmichael of the University of Cambridge organized the first international workshop on Semantic Web applications for learning and teaching support in Higher Education, which took place at the end of September.

SemHE’09 was held in Nice, France, and co-located with the European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning ECTEL’09. Twenty-five delegates from nine different countries took part in the workshop which the organizers hope will be the first in a series of workshops in this area.

‘Our aim is to look at semantic applications in the context of higher education,’ says Dr Tiropanis. ‘In the era of Web 2.0 and Linked Data, with increased requirements for interoperability on a large scale, we need to establish the value of semantic technologies in the higher education context.

‘We want to look specifically at areas such as curriculum development and course creation and examine ways in which semantic technologies support existing or emerging pedagogical approaches in HE such as collaborative learning, critical thinking or case-based learning.

According to Dr Tiropanis, the outcome of the Nice workshop shows that recent developments in Linked Data and Web 2.0 technologies can demonstrate significant potential for supporting higher education challenges and fostering pedagogical innovation.

He believes that the potential for innovation will be further advanced if institutions adopt linked data formats for information they already make public on their Web pages.

During the workshop the potential of enabling approximation in queries for more efficient searches was presented and a number of challenges were identified, relating to the provenance, sustainability, licensing and reliability of today’s linked data cloud. Presentations also focused on how case-based learning can benefit from semantic technologies across a number of disciplines, and how searching learning resources within or across universities can be made more efficient and personalised.

The need to examine further how people relate and interact with resources and with one another in today’s linked data cloud was highlighted in the discussions that followed the paper presentations and the panel session.

'It was a very successful workshop both in terms of the number of delegates and their participation in the discussion,' said Dr Tiropanis. 'Looking at semantic technologies for higher education in this new context will hopefully be fruitful for institutions, teachers and learners.' This workshop was jointly organised and supported by the JISC-funded project SemTech and the ESRC/EPSRC-funded project ENSEMBLE.

For further information contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453.

Professor Noshir Contractor, the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University, USA, and one of the world’s leading network scientists, is to become a Director of the Web Science Trust.

Now rapidly emerging as an important and vibrant area of research and academic endeavour, critical for our understanding of the Web and society, Web Science was launched as a new academic discipline in 2006 under the aegis of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI). The progress made by WSRI in advancing Web Science will now be taken forward by the new Web Science Trust, and Professor Contractor joins WSRI Founding Directors, Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Professor James Hendler, and Professor Nigel Shadbolt as Directors of the Web Science Trust. ‘I’m delighted to welcome Noshir Contractor to the Web Science Trust,’ said Dame Wendy Hall. ‘One of the great successes of the Web has been the ability to create and sustain increasingly complex online networks, and Network Science provides powerful insights into how this is happening and what will be its implications for the future. We have ambitious plans for the development of our Web Science activities and look forward to Noshir’s contribution, which I am confident will provide new perspectives on the development of the Web Science research agenda.’

Professor Contractor is Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group at Northwestern University. He is investigating factors that lead to the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of dynamically linked social and knowledge networks in a wide variety of contexts, including communities of practice in business, science, and engineering, public health networks, and virtual worlds.

He commented: ‘Network Science, like Web Science, is directly addressing the grand societal challenges that we face in the 21st century. Whether these are challenges of the Environment, Energy, Public Health, or Security, the potential of the Web, especially in the formation of networks, plays an increasingly important part in determining how we can understand the challenges and begin to create solutions. I look forward to being part of the Web Science Trust and to working with its Directors and research teams to advance both our disciplines.’

For further information contact Joyce Lewis; tel. +44(0)23 8059 5453.

The GLACSWEB project has entered a new phase with a planned deployment of its electronic sensors in the Los Laureles Canyon in Mexico.

GLACSWEB has been using the sensors – custom-engineered and built in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton – to monitor glacier movements in response to climate change since 2003. Led by Dr Kirk Martinez of the ECS Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia group, and Professor Jane Hart of the School of Geography, the GLACSWEB team first deployed the sensors on the Briksdalsbreen glacier in Norway. The project has aimed to understand glacier dynamics and climatic change, and to make advances in pervasive sensor networks.

Probes have been installed in the sedimentary base of the glacier, about 60 metres under the surface, through the use of a powerful hot-water drill. They record temperature, pressure, speed and movement of the ice, and more importantly of the sediments at its base. Signals emitted by the probes at noon each day carry the data, which are relayed back to a base station on the glacier surface by radio communications, and then transmitted to Southampton by mobile phone. The data is available to researchers.

Large amounts of data were collected by the sensors, but the rapid melting of Briksdalsbreen meant that the glacier became too steep and dangerous to work on, so the project moved to Iceland, to the Skalafellsjokull glacier, part of the giant Vatnajokull icecap. Having successfully overcome many of the technical and logistical difficulties of collecting such critical data, the probes will now be deployed in completely different environment – the Los Laureles Canyon in Mexico, upstream from the Tijuana estuary.

Six sensors will record environmental data over the next two years, in a project funded by the US-based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in the hope that data on changes in the canyon could provide early warning of landslides.

‘A combination of technologies has made environmental sensor webs possible,’ says Dr Martinez. ‘These will eventually be spread around the world and will give us a clearer picture of exactly how we are changing our environment. In order to make successful sensor networks, issues such as: communications, low-power, robustness and adaptability have been approached through a combination of mechanical engineering, electronics, computer science and environmental science.’

See recent coverage of GLACSWEB on the BBC web site.

See GLACSWEB publications on EPrints.

For further information contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453.

ECS researchers have begun a trial of browser and USB (Universal Serial Bus) pen drive applications to assist with the accessibility of Web 2.0 services.

Dr Mike Wald and E.A. Draffan in the Learning Societies Lab within the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) are leading a project funded by JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) TechDis which looks at how well people with disabilities can access web services such as blogs and wikis and social networking sites. The team includes Seb Skuse, Russell Newman and Chris Phethean who have all studied at ECS.

The team have built an accessibility tool kit which will enable users to test the accessibility of web 2.0 services. The accessible pen drive offers freely available assistive technologies that can be used to help with this evaluation.

The tools have been developed as a result of the award-winning LexDis project which identified some of the strategies learners used to enhance their e-learning experience.

Web2Access, part of the toolkit, provides an online checking system for any interactive web-based services such as Facebook.

'We developed it because nowadays users contribute, as well as read, information and so you cannot just click on a button to see if websites are accessible and easy to use,’ said E.A.

According to Dr Wald, it is the first time that there has been a systematic way to evaluate and provide the results of accessibility testing of web services.

A key feature of the tool kit is ‘Study Bar’, which works with all browsers and reads text aloud, spell checks, and offers a dictionary, text enlargement, colour and font changes. Study Bar can be used with web services like blogs and Twitter, which has not been possible before without specialist-installed assistive technologies.

Students at the University of Southampton were introduced to the toolkit last week shortly before testing began. The beta testing will be carried out for four weeks, after which the tools will be passed to JISC TechDis so that they can be distributed further.

For further information contact Joyce Lewis; tel. +44(0)23 8059 5453

New nanoelectronics technologies for healthcare applications, including blood-testing kits which can be mass produced using nanowires, will be unveiled next week by Professor Peter Ashburn at UK NanoForum & Emerging Technologies 2009.

Professor Ashburn, Head of the Nano Research Group at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) will deliver a presentation entitled 'Prospects for New Nanoelectronics Technologies in the 21st Century' at the annual event on Tuesday 3 November at London Hilton on Park Lane Hotel.

During his presentation, Professor Ashburn will describe the innovative research facilities at the Southampton Nanofabrication Centre at the University of Southampton, which houses a £100 million state-of-the art clean room, which opened last month.

According to Professor Ashburn, this facility has given a major boost to prospects for new nanotechnologies for healthcare applications and will make it possible to develop a unique method for fabricating nanowires, so that blood-testing kits can be mass-produced. This will mean that routine blood tests can be carried out in GPs' surgeries, rather than needing to be sent to laboratories, with inevitable delays. The researchers are using nanotechnology similar to that commonly used in computer and television displays to develop this new application.

‘Around one billion laboratory tests are performed in the UK each year for disease diagnosis, the monitoring of disease progression and population screening programmes,’ said Professor Ashburn.

‘If the UK is to move to more predictive, preventive and personalised healthcare, biochemical tests will need to be performed on a much larger scale, at a much lower cost and preferably at point-of-care locations, rather than clinical laboratories. Our new method will make this possible.’

For further information contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453

Professor David De Roure has been appointed to the new role of the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) National Strategic Director of e-Social Science, with Dr Marina Jirotka of the Oxford e-Research Centre as Deputy Director. Both are part of the e-Research South consortium.

The appointments, which begin this month and run for three years, mean that Professor De Roure and Dr Jirotka will take a key strategic role in maximising the uptake, use and impact of new e-technologies across the Social Science community. They will also develop a coherent inter-agency approach drawing on various national and international e-Social Science initiatives. 'In the past five years, the National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) has made excellent progress towards establishing powerful new research tools and methods,' said Professor De Roure who directs e-Research activities at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS). ‘Our experience in e-Research, coupled with the fact that Southampton is the home of the National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM), puts us in a great position to build on the achievements of NCeSS and communicate these new approaches to the broader research community and the next generation of researchers.'

Dr Jirotka, Associate Director of the Oxford e-Research Centre, added: ‘My background in both social and computer science will enable me to assist in the coordination of training and capacity building activities to embed e-Social Science techniques in research practice and make effective use of emerging infrastructure.’

Professor Ian Diamond, Chief Executive at ESRC said:'ESRC is pleased to announce the appointment of Professor De Roure and Dr Jirotka, who combined will provide an ideal leadership team , bringing extensive experience and expertise to the NCeSS research programme to enable social scientists to harness the wealth of digital technologies in undertaking innovative world- leading research.'

Professor De Roure has just returned from an intensive tour of the US with Professor Malcolm Atkinson, UK e-Science Envoy, on a fact-finding mission which is set to inform UK strategy and develop international collaborations.

‘e-Science and e-Social Science are very highly thought of internationally,’ he said. ‘We are establishing a terrific network of advisors and collaborators to ensure that e-Social Science goes from strength to strength.’

For further information contact Joyce Lewis; tel. +44(0)23 8059 5453.

Last week’s international celebration of Open Access was given added momentum by the announcement of the world’s 100th Open Access Mandate, from the University of Salford, UK.

This was the first-ever internationally designated Open Access Week (19-23 October), providing an opportunity to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access to research and to celebrate the successes achieved by the Open Access movement, within the global research communities and the world’s higher education institutions.

The first Open Access Mandate was adopted by the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton. In 2002 ECS proposed and then mandated that all of its own research output must be made accessible free for all on the Web in order to maximize its usage and impact.

While mandates at first grew slowly, despite coming from significant national research funding councils, such as the NIH in the US and RCUK in the UK, last year’s adoption of mandates by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and UCL provides a strong indication that the next steps in the growth of Open Access will be exponential, according to Professor Stevan Harnad, Archivangelist of the OA Movement.

‘With the world's 100th Open Access mandate, the global Academy - the "Slumbering Giant" of Open Access - is showing irreversible signs of awakening,’ said Stevan Harnad. ‘Not all research is funded, but virtually all of it originates from universities. The coincidence of the 100th mandate with worldwide Open Access Week makes it look ever more likely that the planet is heading toward universal OA at long last, to the everlasting benefit of research, researchers, their universities, their funders, the R&D industries, and the tax-paying public that supports the research and for whose benefit it is all being conducted.’

Professor Martin Hall, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Salford, commented: ‘I am delighted that Salford's Open Access mandate is the 100th in the world and that it coincides with the first international Open Access Week. Through Open Access the University of Salford can now fully contribute to the local and global knowledge economy by sharing Salford’s proud tradition for research with all.â€?

Professor Peter Suber, another leading voice in the OA movement, also welcomed Salford’s adoption of Open Access: ‘Funder and university OA policies enlarge the volume of peer-reviewed OA research and educate researchers about their OA options,’ he said.

‘The large number of institutions with strong policies, the large volume of research liberated, and the large number of researchers benefiting as authors and readers all make very clear that the OA fire has been lit in many places. We needn't worry that it will go out. Each new policy brings us closer to a tipping point of deep change in the ways that researchers disseminate peer-reviewed research and in the ways that everyone benefits from the sharing and acceleration of that research.’

Open Access Week was marked in many countries across the world: it built on the momentum begun by the student-led national day of action in 2007 and carried forward by the 120 campuses in 27 countries that celebrated Open Access Day in 2008. SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition) the PLoS (The Public Library of Science), and Students for FreeCulture (last year’s organizers) welcomed new key contributors for 2009: OASIS (the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook); Open Access Directory (OAD); and eIFL.net (Electronic Information for Libraries), which spearheaded events in developing and transitional countries. Partner organizations also engaged their communities in every corner of the globe.

Dr Les Carr of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton and Director of EPrints at ECS which provides the software to run many of the world’s leading repositories, underlined the importance of all this concerted effort: ‘It’s important to pay tribute to the co-ordinated action of the international research community,’ he said, ‘including funding councils and research institutions across the globe which have worked in harmony through proactive local policies (mandates) to bring about international Open Access through an established network of research repositories.’

Since Salford's announcement, another five mandates have been implemented, bringing the global total of institutional mandates to 105.

For further information contact Joyce Lewis; tel. +44(0)23 8059 5453.

Two ECS researchers are presenting the latest developments in learning technologies, for all students including those with disabilities, in the USA this week.

Dr Mike Wald of the School of Electronics and Computer Science Learning Societies Lab presented the latest developments in his award-winning web-based Synote at a symposium at the IBM TJ Watson Research Centre, New York on Monday 9 November.

He demonstrated publicly for the first time new enhancements to the programme which provide the unique ability to synchronise live notes taken using Twitter with synchronised lecture recordings and transcripts created using IBM’s speech recognition software

Synote enhances the learning of all students, including disabled students, and has been developed with the support of the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee). Synote won the EUNIS Dorup E-learning Award 2009 and is being used in the UK, Germany and Italy as part of the European Net4Voice project as well as in US, Canada and Australia by other members of the Liberated Learning Consortium.

The question of how people with disabilities are to access Web 2.0 technologies as they develop further will be addressed by E.A. Draffan, also from ECS Learning Societies Lab in a presentation at the 12th Annual Accessing Higher Ground - Accessible Media, Web and Technology Conference in Colorado on Thursday 12 November.

E.A, who led a team which has just launched a tool kit to test the accessibility of Web 2.0 services, will deliver a lecture entitled: 'Walking the tightrope between standards and a holistic approach to Web 2.0 usability and accessibility'. In her presentation, E.A. will highlight the need to enhance the knowledge of a wider network of informal experts and academic staff to enable them to introduce disabled students to the many web-based tools which are currently emerging. This would allow disabled students to further develop their skills and perhaps in time also become informal experts who would be willing to share the strategies they have developed with others as can be seen on the LexDis website.

'In the past, people used their assistive technologies mainly with desktop computer applications, now they are spending far more time online’, said E.A. ’They are also collaborating and communicating via social networks, blogs and wikis, which are not always accessible; however, often with the support of friends and tutors, they find workarounds and go on to build their own strategies.'

‘It is only through Open Access that research can be used, applied and built upon by all its intended users, rather than only those whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in which it happens to be published’, says ECS Professor Stevan Harnad, commenting on a major article in today’s Times Higher Education.

The article Learning to Share provides extensive coverage of the Open Access debate and its implications for researchers and publishers. It also underlines the important role played in the development of Open Access by the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) and the University of Southampton.

ECS has been at the forefront of the Open Access movement since the early 1990s and was the first in the world to adopt an open access mandate (in 2002), requiring its researchers to self-archive all their research online. The EPrints software created for this purpose now drives many of the world’s leading institutional repositories.

‘ECS pioneered the institutional repository, designing the EPrints software as a means of encouraging open access in 1999,’ said Dr Les Carr, EPrints Technical Director. ‘Since 2002 when we adopted our own mandate, our repository has grown to over 4000 open access full-text research publications.’

In 2005, EPrints Services was launched by the School to provide training and repository-hosting services for research institutions across the world. ‘EPrints Services has proved a great success,’ said Dr Carr, ‘enabling us to pass on the expertise that we have developed over the years and to help institutions to customize their own OA repositories for their needs.’

As well as Open Access to research publications, EPrints is being developed to support emerging Open Data and Open Science agendas through projects funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). ECS researchers, including Tim Berners-Lee, Nigel Shadbolt, Stevan Harnad, Tony Hey, Wendy Hall and Les Carr, have been at the forefront of advocating these changes in scientific practice and arguing for changes in national and international scientific policies.

Today's (12 November) article, backed up by the THE’s editorial from Ann Mroz also underlined the importance of Open Access in both generating and measuring research ‘impact’. Impact metrics are increasingly being used to evaluate and reward research excellence by funding bodies and government agencies. Ann Mroz writes: ‘A recent pre-print by Stevan Harnad et al. of research into citation impact shows that authors whose papers are made open access are cited significantly more than authors whose articles are available only to subscribers. The Open Citation Project provides ample evidence of this.' The pre-print will soon be posted publicly.

In parallel, a petition to mandate open access self-archiving has just been introduced to the German Bundestag, as both open-access mandates and open-access metrics keep gathering momentum worldwide.

ECS Professors Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt are behind the significant change in policy towards public data announced by the Prime Minster yesterday (17 November).

Speaking to an invited audience at 10 Downing Street, Gordon Brown announced that the Government would be exploring ways to make some of the Ordnance Survey maps freely available online from April 2010. The Prime Minister also signalled his intention to publish 2,000 data sets in the New Year, potentially including all legislation, road-traffic information, property prices by stamp-duty yield, and motoring offences by county.

Both Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt were present at yesterday’s briefing, which represented key results of their work advising the Government over the last five months. As Government Information Advisors they have been persuasive in laying out the benefits of publishing non-personal public data for reuse, in machine-readable formats and without restrictive licences.

Writing in today’s Times (Put in your postcode, out comes the data), they note that their work is not about building a huge new IT project but more about changing attitudes: ‘We just need to change the culture of Whitehall and town halls’, they write, ‘so that data is seen as public property. At present too much is hidden from public view, compartmentalised into silos and difficult to process.’

The Government’s announcement represents a very large amount of progress over a surprisingly short timeframe: ‘It’s moving very quickly, said Nigel Shadbolt. ‘There seems to be a real appetite from users, developers and data-holders to do more with our non-personal public data.’

‘One of the most important aspects of yesterday’s announcement is the access it provides to geographical information, since it’s geography that makes sense of so much of the other information that has and will become available.’

Under the direction of the ECS Professors, the Cabinet Office has already launched a developer’s version of the data.gov.uk website, which will be public in the New Year. It currently provides access to 1100 datasets, ranging from traffic counts on the road network, through reference data on schools, to the Farm Survey. Over 1000 people are already using the site to improve and refine it for its public release.

In addition to the public gain in making the data accessible, Nigel Shadbolt also sees a range of potential benefits for technology and Web standards, and for business applications: ‘This kind of work is a good illustration of the objectives of Web Science,’ he said. ‘It includes technology development, policy, economics, and social change.’

‘Over the coming weeks we will continue to push to get more data available in addition to seeking Government commitments for the release of that data. We also want to ensure we can inspire the community to exploit the data and give us applications that will enable it to be used as widely as possible.’

The Times article concludes with a reaffirmation of the importance of this work: ‘Openly available public data not only creates economic and social capital, it also creates bottom-up pressure to improve public services. Data is essential in enabling citizens to choose between public service providers. It helps them to compare their local services with services elsewhere. It enables all of us to lobby for improvement. Public data is a public good.’

For further information contact Joyce Lewis; tel. +44(0)23 8059 5453.