Enrique De Andrés Galiana, Institute of Health Carlos III, Madrid, Spain Victoria Lopez Alonso, Institute of Health Carlos III, Madrid, Spain Laura Salamanca Rodriguez*, Institute of Health Carlos III, Madrid, Spain Isabel Hermosilla Gimeno, Institute of Health Carlos III, Madrid, Spain Fernando Martin-sanchez, Institute of Health Carlos III, Madrid, Spain Track: Research Presentation Topic: Search, Collaborative Filtering and Recommender Technologies Presentation Type: Oral presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Building: MaRS Centre, 101 College Street, Toronto, Canada Room: Auditorium Date: 2009-09-18 01:30 PM – 03:00 PM Last modified: 2009-08-13

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Background: The Internet has become the main routine method used by scientists to gather the information that they need to carry out their research work. Members of a biomedical research unit need to manage large amounts of articles, web references or newsletters content, that must be structured, organized and made readily available. The rise of the interactive and social web poses new challenges in this regard. Our experience shows that Web 2.0 might be better considered as an opportunity to improve the exchange of information, ideas and knowledge between peer researchers.

Objective: To improve the process of collecting, structuring and sharing information from the Web 2.0 and make it available for its use in the daily work of a research department. The system has been designed using a metaphor: it could be compared to a radio receiver. Just as the radio allows the user to scan the radio-electric spectrum looking for a specific frequency, BIKMAS can be oriented as an antenna to find out concrete thematic contents over the web 2.0 and retrieve, annotate, organize and make this information available for all the members of a research group.

Methods: The system has been implemented under open source software tools, (Liferay as portal manager, Glassfish as application server, MySQL as DBMS). The portal consists of six distinct work areas (Start, Personal, News, Content, Articles and Publications). “Start” and “Personal” areas represent a shared space that facilitates routine work, offering tools such as a calendar, forum or a web catalogue. “News” is the area where the system aggregates the information retrieved through the RSS (Really Simply Sindication) standard. This area is organized in 15 thematic areas of interest and is compliant with web 2.0 content formats: Text (news, wikis, blogs), folksonomies (i.e.: delicious bookmarks), presentations (such as Slideshare), multimedia (Pod and Videocasts). The “Content” area provides an easy and flexible manner to use the information obtained through the news area and create new documents. The “Articles” area assists the members of the Unit in managing the workflow towards publication of research information and finally the “Publications” area presents the articles in a RSS format in order to allow other users to subscribe to the newly generated information.

Results: The system has been in use since January 2009 on the Intranet of our Institute and it is already connected with 79 different Web 2.0 information sources grouped in 15 thematic areas. The system currently includes 83 folders of research topics including a total of 116 documents and 33 folders dedicated to store information for specific uses or activities of the research unit (courses, grant proposal, scientific talks). A knowledge map is available in the form of a tag cloud.

Conclusions: BIKMAS provides the research group with an integrated knowledge management toolbox that supports the workflow consisting of transforming multidisciplinary, multiformat information selectively collected from the Web 2.0 into structured knowledge that can be shared and used by the members of the group to accomplish their main research tasks.