The Open University's Knowledge Media Institute (KMi, http://kmi.open.ac.uk) has an opening for a PhD student to undertake research on novel methods and tools to support the exploration of research spaces.  Exploration and decision-making in complex domains, such as research, typically involves the retrieval and analysis of large volumes of complex, heterogeneous information from distributed sources. However existing tools available to users only partially support this process. At the same time the growing availability of Linked Data on the Web provides a fabric of structured data upon which tools can be developed that have the potential to reduce the manual aggregation effort and bring more sophisticated analysis capabilities to users.

Specifically,  the proposed research may address one or more of a number of issues, including:

- How can the variety of distributed data, which currently exist in Semantic Web formats, be integrated with standard bibliographic data and used to improve the exploration of research spaces?

- How can the variety of distributed data, which currently exist in Web 2.0 repositories in a semi-structured form be integrated with both standard bibliographic data and Semantic Web resources, and used to improve the exploration of research spaces?

- In addition to the classic indicators of academic excellence (e.g., citations), other indicators of 'academic kudos' can now be found or mined from the Web. How can these various types of indicators be explored in an integrated way, to improve the accuracy and the granularity of expert search?

- What kind of novel visualization, navigation and data mining techniques can most effectively support students and researchers in making sense of research spaces?

- How can the key evolutionary research trends be identified and linked to concrete academic activities, such as conferences, publishing, etc.?

- How might the methods and tools developed in this research be applicable to related areas of exploration and decision-making, such as reporting and analytics in a business domain, or product selection in the consumer realm?

For more details about this and other PhD positions at KMi, please visit http://kmi.open.ac.uk/studentships/vacancies.php

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