The Gold Dust Project
Profiles and RSS feeds what a lethal combination. Roderick MacLeod sent me an email about a research project that will use ticTOCS usage data to creat Personal Interest Profiles (PIPs). The research project is called Gold Dust. And it aims to study the use of profiles, information overload and RSS feeds to deliver important and bare essential news.
The project will develop Personal Interest Profiles (PIPs) from existing data. It will exploit the potential of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and will aggregate content from numerous sources*. It will then incorporate text mining techniques and terminological searching aids in a filtering process between the PIPs and the aggregated content. It will use the complex information landscape subject area of engineering as its test-bed, and a controlled group of fifty academic testers as its main user community, with additional engagement with the U&I Community.[Source]
The aim of the project is to attempt to produce PIPs, match them with information mined from different RSS aggregations and test its effectiveness in delivering contents to the test subscribers.
In other words: Usage data from a test group of people will be used to create PIPs. Then text mining techniques will then be used to match specific Pips to specific set of posts taken from RSS feeds. The results are then delivered to the manner and method a user desires.
Categories for the databases of RSS content will include but will not be limited to the following:
1. News items in Institutional and subject repositories
2. Calls for Papers
3. Funding opportunity news
4. Patents
5. Press Releases
6. Professional Society News
7. Engineering News Feeds and component announcements
8. Teaching and learning resources
9. Journal Tables of Contents
10. Forthcoming conferences
11. Theses and dissertations
12. News from JISC services and projects
Although still in the research stage it does have a lot potential and as research goes will add important findings and insights in the knowledge of information overload and RSS. Profiles and custom made filters for RSS feeds, the potential of this study is promising.
Thank you Roddy for the tip off on this one.
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Check out what others are saying about this post...[...] 10, 2008 The Gold Dust project was mentioned in the A feed is born blog, Jan 9th, and in our Heriot Watt Library spineless? blog today. As Gold Dust is a research [...]