WP2 Meeting 13th October: Designing & implementing Machine learning algorithms, workflow based interface and content-based algorithms

On the 13^th October 2011 Farhi Marir and Eamonn met to discuss progress regarding Work Package 2 deliverables. We began with a demonstration of the present functionality of eRaUI, including the new ontology editing tools which have been created, whereby administrators can edit terms within a dictionary (ontology) which are matched to weightings indicating their specificity to a category (i.e. novice, student, expert). We also saw a demonstration of the new ‘term highlighting and hiding’ proposed by Sahithi, whereby users are presented with the content most suited to their requirements in highlighted form, while less relevant content is greyed out.

Within the new editable ontology terms are incremented automatically according to frequency of clicking. This is a provisional system, and it has been proposed that this is made admin-changeable only. We discussed a simple provisional algorithm for determining the overall category of a term, whereby the component weightings are divided by the sum of all components to give an ‘average relevance’. Furthermore, we discussed the use of ‘dynamic categories’, whereby administrators are able to decide which types of user can be present in the system (i.e. novice, expert, student or other). This makes eRaUI into a more generic tool than it would be otherwise. We decided that for dynamically created categories, the administrator must be able to specify a sort order for these categories to appear in.

The widget is designed to attempt to determine the user’s category (i.e. level of expertise) while they are browsing. While the widget displays the predicted level and allows this to be changed, we agree that this shall be kept for informational purposes only in later prototypes.

We also saw a rudimentary demonstration of the real-time user stream, whereby the administrator can detect and examine user sessions in real-time. We agreed that we should be able to demarcate users currently using the system by user level and country, to facilitate analysis and administrator intervention if necessary.

Lastly we discussed the use of window panes, whereby we can display items of content related to search terms entered into the widget. We noted that we must create a new ontology of terms to support this mechanism. For instance, searching for ‘Seminars’ might also yield ‘workshops’ and ‘conferences’, which will be placed into their own window panes as a preview.