A Personalized Web 2.0 Service for Authoritative Content

The mission of the DOE¿s Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) is to advance America¿s technological position by making information more available and useful. OSTI faces significant challenges: (1) current content collections are largely restricted to text documents and databases, which means that the potential for exploiting knowledge embedded in scientific multimedia content such as blogs, podcasts, and videos is not being realized; (2) functionality is largely confined to search services; other services ¿ e.g., personalization (where users can more easily find and receive information in a form suited to their individual needs) and collaboration (where users can derive benefit from interaction with others through `user generated content¿ (UGC) such as discussions, ratings, and classification tags) ¿ that would make the information more useful to consumers are needed; and (3), the currently-used Web 1.0 technical framework is incapable of supporting the rich media interactivity and syndication that is needed and currently available in Web 2.0 services. Using a technical framework based on Web 2.0, this project will develop technology to identify, aggregate, and provide trusted sources of authoritative multimedia content (videos, blogs, podcasts) in the renewable energy domain. The approach will include automated methods and algorithms for ranking content based on authority or trust; cross-platform widgets for packaging authoritative content; and tools and services that support multimedia search, authority ranking and assessment, personalization, collaboration, social networking and UGC. Commercial Applications and other Benefits as described by the awardee: Although the technology will be designed for individual stakeholders in the STI community across private, government, and academic sectors, STI publishing should become the major commercial market. STI publishers would use these services to enable value-added features to would increase the utility of their content to their users. Their advertisers would be able to expand their reach, improve their targeting, and better understand how their content is used. End customers would benefit from an efficient means for assessing the authority behind STI blogs, videos, and podcasts. This is a multi-billion dollar market comprised of thousands of specialized publishers.