Case Study: SPIE
Need:
After Access innovations, Inc. built a custom thesaurus and taxonomy for SPIE (The International Society for Optics and Photonics), they needed to be able to incorporate their thesaurus and taxonomy to further leverage their information. Specifically, SPIE wanted tolink their taxonomy to the eJournalPress peer review software that they use.
Background:
Background
The SPIE organizations website needed significant improvements in order to get the most use out of the new thesaurus and taxonomy that we built for them. We found that the website could benefit from features that would include content contributions by researchers. Some features that could enhance their data included:
- Self-tagging of author/researcher profiles using a navigable, searchable thesaurus, along with a function enabling them to paste in samples of their text or titles and obtain immediate categorization suggestions
- Online author suggestion of new thesaurus terms
- A platform for ad hoc online formation of mini-societies that would allow researchers of highly specialized topics to collaborate without going through the hassle of Facebook-like interfaces
- Improved visibility and viewability of the thesaurus
- Improvement of the search interface and functionality
- Addition of a research grant announcements feature, with the grant announcements categorized and searchable by thesaurus terms (This could rely on external contributors if appropriately monitored.)
- XIS database platform
- An author manuscript submission system
- An author networking platform
The Solution:
Access, Innovations Inc., proposed that SPIE use the Data Harmony suite to further enhance their search capabilities. We suggested providing their users with a navigation interface like ones they are familiar with from the Internet. It was built top-down so that users could choose the term most associated with what they are searching for. For author profile categorizations, we proposed a thesaurus-based categorization (“indexing”) approach in which the rules were editable by subject experts. Access Innovations’ Data Harmony Author Submission System provides authors with the tools to submit work for publication with all required metadata and in XML format. An interface with Data Harmony suggests subject terms from the organization’s thesaurus for subject indexing. Authors select the most appropriate term to be saved with the submission and can make suggestions for other indexing terms. The suggestions are stored in a separate field to be included when published as appropriate for the document. The suggested terms are valuable for the thesaurus manager in keeping the thesaurus up-to-date. They also enable topic- and expertise-appropriate networking, and efficient identification of appropriate peer reviewers. The author submission system described above enables users to contribute to and create a rich database of authors, researchers, and reviewers, including their self-assigned areas of expertise. We are in the process of integrating the author profile database with an implementation of the SPIE Thesaurus.