Writeslike.us: a Rapid Innovation project

Writeslike.us was a 6-month JISC-funded project that explored the automated extraction of information about community structures. It was led by UKOLN at the University of Bath, with the University of Minho as a partner. The project ran from April to October 2009.

This is a practical development project for development of a prototype repository enhancement service which automatically extracts candidate community participation information from analysis of existing documents and metadata. Along with the prototype a sample interface will be developed and tested. This project links formal and informal metadata for the purpose of helping individuals discover others with shared topics and interests, which has been described as an important step in linking individuals together without formal social networking information.

Partners

Ana Alice Baptista, University of Minho

Useful links

• Google Code site for writeslike.us
• Writeslike.us prototype

Contacts

Project manager: Emma Tonkin
Developers: Andrew Hewson, Alexey Strelnikov

Project outputs

Deliverable available at Google Code site
Prototype available at prototype page
Documentation to be placed here ASAP
Some data soon to be released here as linked data
Additional information available from the UKOLNDev blog.

Further information

Tonkin, E., 2010. Writeslike.us: Linking People through OAI Metadata. In: ELPUB 2010 - Publishing in the Networked World: Transforming the Nature of Communication. , pp. 98-118. University of Bath Repository Opus ID 18723

The Jisc project page for Writeslike.us is available at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/inf11/jiscri/writeslikeus.aspx

An archive version of the Writeslike.us site is available on the Internet Archive. On 13 March 2013 had been crawled 17 times, going back to 10 February 2010.