News Story

CORE at the World Summit on the Information Society review organised by UNESCO

Petr Knoth, Friday 8 Mar 2013

The first multi-stakeholder review of the achievements of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS+10) entitled "Towards Knowledge Societies for Peace and Sustainable Development” was hosted by UNESCO in Paris from 25 to 27 February 2013. The event attracted about 1000 participants from around the world; about 1500 additional people participated on-line. Zdenek Zdrahal was invited to participate in the high-level roundtable entitled “24. Using E-Science to Strengthen the Interface between Science, Policy and Society”. The panel was chaired by the Assistant Director-General for Natural Sciences, Ms Gretchen Kalonji and included seven members (governmental ministers, ambassadors, Head of Digital Science Unit of the European Commission and the Ex-Chief Scientific Advisor for UK Government department). The aim of the roundtable was to explore the opportunities and challenges of using e-Science to support decision making in science policy, to look at the technical requirements for designing a web-based platform to support decision making in science policy and to share experiences gained from developing similar platforms.

Zdenek Zdrahal presented the CORE system for aggregating, semantic enrichment and accessing open access scientific papers. The potential of CORE for supporting novel approaches to E-Science was explained. As an example, the conference portal “UNESCO Repository for Connecting Local and International Content (CLIC)” developed for UNESCO by the CORE team at KMi was presented. Documents submitted to the UNESCO conferences through CLIC are semantically enriched and linked to the most similar scientific papers aggregated by CORE from the world open access repositories. Since one of the WSIS+10 hot topics discussed by many participants from governments, industry and academia was “broadband learning”, the possibility of using CORE services for projects like Futurelearn were also outlined. The presentation continued by a number of informal meetings with the WSIS+10 participants where the future directions of CORE development and the possibilities of using CORE services were discussed.