Back in April we applied for a National Science Foundation (NSF) Science, Technology, Engineer, and Mathematics (STEM) grant that involved building tools to help the National STEM Education Distributed Learning (NSDL) group accomplish its goals. The acronyms and obtuse titles are a bit much but the aims of the integrated services track (which we applied to) are relatively simple: “Enhance overall capabilities of the NSDL network to meet the needs of its user and developer communities including the need to demonstrate impact of content and resources.”
Below is the Letter of Intent that we submitted along with the grant:
Proposed Title
Persistent Adaptively Refined Teleoreactive Algorithms and Representations applied to Information Retrieval and Collaborative Project Development
Submitting Organization
Helioid LLC
Synopsis
The goals of the project are 1) develop information retrieval services enabling users at any level of technical expertise or familiarity with NSDL to intuitively navigate its corpus and more efficiently locate resources related to their interests and needs, 2) develop a collaborative environment integrated with social networking tools allowing users to share, design, and discuss educational resources, lesson plans, assignments, projects, etc. and 3) merge unstructured information into the NSDL Data Repository (NDR).
Advanced search and visualization algorithms are applied to data in the NDR. Searches iteratively parse the intent of users’ actions and adapt so that the documents returned are most relevant to the accomplishment of users’ goals. Search results are presented as 2D/3D visualizations showing links between similar documents and cues indicating documents’ semantic and topic categories. Users interact with these visualizations, narrowing their search results by changing documents’ categorization, hiding or retrieving results similar to categories or documents, and otherwise navigating the search space.
Users employ these search tools to build collections of documents and create search agents that persistently retrieve documents similar to the topics of an existing collection. They then review retrieved documents and keep those of interest. Users collaboratively create, modify, and develop documents which are then grouped into collections, commented on, and made available for searching, synopsizing, and integration into the NDR. These features create a collaborative environment.
The project leverages existing collaboration tools to increase the effectiveness with which users can educate others and themselves. It is developed in an extensible and interoperable manner so that users can both easily use the provided services in their own work and augment it with additional functionality. The project integrates unstructured data into the NDR by making all internet documents searchable and combinable with the NDR documents. To assess its achievements, the project analyzes and presents metric data generated by users’ interactions with its services and consequently adapts its functionality.
Colleagues at Stanford and Princeton will assist in incubating the project and promoting its growth. Beyond its establishment, the project will become a self sustaining business and continue developing services that transform information into knowledge.