Text Mining for Scholarly Communications and Repositories Joint Workshop

The Text Mining workshop was held in Manchester on 28-29th October 2009 and focused on the challenges and priorities associated with integrating text mining technologies in applications to support scholarly communication and repository initiatives. With the vast amounts of information now available on the internet, the benefits provided by text mining for discovering relevant documents have become increasingly significant.

Professor Tony Hey presented the keynote and he spoke about the need for more intelligent data discovery in a multi-disciplinary and collaborative way for Science to move from data and information towards knowledge (DIKW). These complex technologies have been applied successfully to the Science domains, particularly chemistry and medicine and are being adopted by BioMedCentral and Elsevier. Rafael Sidi from Elsevier again spoke of information overload and the importance of building applications on top of content using open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). This would allow interoperability and collaboration between publishers' collections and the potential for free access to content with subscriptions for the added services.

Emma Tonkin's overview of the FixRep Project at UKOLN that is examining text mining techniques for automated metadata extraction was particularly relevant to the repository world. Presentations are now available online at The National Centre for Text Mining.