Connected Knowledge

Early morning conference calls are rarely a cause for excitement,  but my call this morning with the Collexis users group was a nice change of pace. Oregon Health & Science University (my primary employer) was a relatively early adopter of the Collexis Research Profiling System.  We use it as our public facing Research Expertise Locator and have been more or less happy with the tool, but have had a long wish list of enhancements.  With version 3.5 of Research Profiling, which will be rolled out over the next couple of weeks, Collexis chips away at that wish list and seems to finally be realizing into the potential of their platform.

Collexis creates a professional profile of a scientist by mining public information sources, such as PubMed and NIH RePORTER, for the concepts with which each researcher is most strongly associated. For example, here is a profile of OHSU’s Vice President for Research, Dan Dorsa . In addition to the basics, contact information, research interests, funding, publications, and the like, the profile shows Dr. Dorsa’s collaboration network,  trends in his activities and identifies similar experts at our institution.  Version 3.5 adds some incremental improvements in the functionality.  A few of the highlights are CV integration with the profile (bye bye InfoEd GENIUS), self-serve bulk data export  and bibliographic export to Endnote. (They also finally explain why the nodes in the collaboration network map keep moving in that weird psuedo-brownian way.)

This is all welcome news, but what got me all atwitter this morning was the announcement that Collexis will be working with Mike Conlon to develop a connector between Collexis and VIVO.  Dr. Conlon is Associate CIO for IT Architecture for the University of Florida and Principal Investigator on the VIVO: Enabling National Networking of Scientists project.  VIVO is “an NIH funded study to develop and implement a semantic web-based platform for representing faculty interests, activities and accomplishments, and make that data available to search, social networking and a new generation of interoperable collaborative applications.”  In short, VIVO aims to create a national system of federated research expertise directories. 

The project received a significant vote of confidence from the National Institutes of Health last October in the form of a $12.2 million NCRR grant. The planned Collexis / VIVO connector will publish information from a Collexis application, like OHSU’s Research Expertise Locator, to VIVO and will present VIVO search results within any Collexis-powered portal. Collexis will also offer hosted VIVO implementations to their customers.  No timeframe has been given for the availability of the connector.  This is understandable since the VIVO consortium hasn’t finalized their implementation and spec.

The new version of Research Profiling also marks a significant expansion of the scope of the Collexis platform by incorporating information beyond the life sciences in the form of Elsevier’s SCOPUS.  The first implementation of this new range of subjects (based on release 7.2 of the Collexis engine) will be for the University of North Carolina and North Carolina State, eventually expanding to 18 institutions for a statewide deployment.

The User Group call wrapped up with an overview of two forthcoming features that won’t be included in the 3.5 release, but that are pretty exciting.  First is “community functionality” which will allow users to search for expertise across institutions with Collexis implementations.  According to Christian Herzog, Managing Director of Science, Technical and Medical Markets for Collexis, this functionality is ready to go.  A demonstration implementation has been deployed at the University of Michigan Medical School.  But rather than simply opening up cross institution search, Collexis has wisely decided to consult its customers first to determine how (and if) this could best serve them.  Conversations around this topic will happen over the next couple of weeks, but all of us on the call were enthusiastic.

The second “coming soon” feature demonstrated on the call was a new Metrics Module (shown below).  This module incorporates data visualization tools into the Research Profiling toolset allowing you to compare departmental (or even individual) research performance over time and according to whatever rubric is meaningful to your institution.  This will provide capabilities similar to another Elsevier offering, SciVal, but will be a lot cheaper. This functionality will not be part of the public portal, but will be available to authorized users within each institution.

It will be interesting to see how the partnership between Collexis and VIVO plays out.  Prior to VIVO receiving the NCRR grant, Collexis had been in discussions with the University of Pittsburgh (my alma mater) to form a similar alliance with the Digital|Vita project under Titus Schuyler.  If nothing else, it demonstrates that Collexis is in tune with developments in research networking and rather than trying to dominate is more interested in integrating and collaborating.  I think this is a good sign.  After all, isn’t that the whole point?