Zdenek Zdrahal's profile document
Description for Zdenek Zdrahal
Zdenek Zdrahal
Zdenek Zdrahal
Zdenek
Zdrahal
Emeritus Professor
My research interests include the application of AI in design, case based reasoning, information extraction, predictive modelling, machine learning and knowledge sharing.
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The Open University account for Zdenek Zdrahal
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Zdenek Zdrahal's membership at KMi
Zdenek Zdrahal's participation in ENRICH
ENRICH
ENRICH
1998-10-01
2001-03-31
Enriching Representations of Work to Support Organisational Learning
The Enrich Project aims to develop tools and methodologies for integrating working and learning within knowledge intensive organisations. It builds upon our existing technologies supporting web based collaboration, agents and knowledge modelling. The ENRICH project will foster the use of knowledge-enriched intranets to provide the means for sharing expertise.
Zdenek Zdrahal's participation in RichODL
RichODL
RichODL
Dynamic system modellers and simulators to assist in the training of students and employees
This project is intended to assist in the training of students and employees as dynamic system modellers and simulators. It makes use of KMi technologies such as WebOnto (see A5), to provide a means of indexing and searching tutorial material, and D3E (see A5) to provide a space for discussing results.
Zdenek Zdrahal's participation in MGT
MGT
MGT
1998-11-01
2001-10-31
Medical Guideline Technology
This project aims at designing and implementing techniques for computer representation of medical guidelines, which integrate generic recommendations for specific medical circumstances (generic medical guidelines) with site-specific conditions (site ontology) and an applicable cost model.
Zdenek Zdrahal's participation in Clockwork
Clockwork
Clockwork
Creating Learning Organizations by means of Contextualized Knowledge-Rich Work Artefacts
This project aims to support knowledge sharing within distributed teams, knowledge reuse within an organization and collaboration and trade between engineering companies. The Clockwork approach will combine knowledge-rich dynamical simulation tools, formal documentation and informal design rationale to closely integrate working, learning, collaboration and negotiation, within and between organizations.
Zdenek Zdrahal's participation in Subtle
Subtle
Subtle
2004-11-01
2005-10-30
Semantic Ubiquitous Technologies for Learning and Exploration
The SUbTLE project builds on the results of two separate EU projects, the work of the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) on the CIPHER project and the work of the Institute of Educational Technology (IET) UserLab on the MOBIlearn project.
One of the outcomes of the CIPHER project was a set of tools for exploring annotated digital resources. The MOBIlearn project produced a number of models for guiding the design and development of content for mobile learning. The SUbTLE project aims to build on these outcomes in order to produce a set of educational tools for facilitating learning in mobile contexts.
Zdenek Zdrahal's participation in Apollo
Apollo
Apollo
User-friendly knowledge modelling application
Apollo is a user-friendly knowledge modelling application with a main goal of staying independent from the representation languages and reasoning back-ends. It does a full consistency check while editing and supports I/O plugins.
Zdenek Zdrahal's participation in TINY-IN
TINY-IN
TINY-IN
2002-03-01
2005-04-30
True Interactivity for Young Viewers of Virtual Broadcast Content via Intelligent Interfaces
TINY-IN is a two year EPSRC DTI LINK funded project that started in August 2002. Our overall research objective is to investigate how an interactive narrative engine could create coherent and engaging experiences by intelligently recombining content developed for broadcast. As a test case, we are using characters, scenarios and contexts based on the "Tiny Planets" 3D computer animation TV series produced by Pepper's Ghost Productions and shown on Children?s ITV. Through this approach we aim to develop new exciting types of interactive 'television' material that provide a richer experience for young children at a significantly lower production cost.
Zdenek Zdrahal's participation in CIPHER
CIPHER
CIPHER
2002-04-01
2004-09-30
Communities of Interest Promoting Heritage of European Regions
CIPHER is a two and a half year project funded by the European Commission under the theme 'Heritage for All' that started in April 2002. The aim of the project is to develop innovative technologies and methodologies to support Cultural Heritage Forums, beyond current virtual galleries or museums, that allow visitors to investigate cultural artefacts, and produce their own personal and shared spaces. Visitors will be supported by advanced storytelling and visualisation tools. The Cultural Heritage Forums to be developed during the project are "Irish Cultural and Natural and Heritage", "Nordic Heritage through Storytelling and Historical Artefacts", "Shared Heritage of Central Europe" and "Tradition of technology innovation in South Central England".
Zdenek Zdrahal's participation in ReFLEx
ReFLEx
ReFLEx
2006-01-01
2006-12-31
Resources For Learning by Exploration
The ReFLEx project is exploring how semantic web technologies could be applied to support students' use of OU course materials and related online resources within an integrated learning enviornment.
Zdenek Zdrahal's participation in PhiloSURFical
PhiloSURFical
PhiloSURFical
Semantically browse a philosophical text
PhiloSURFical is an application built to experiment the new navigation mechanisms the Semantic Web can make available. Thanks to a domain ontology, the navigation and understanding of a philosophical text is enhanced by providing it with a series of departing contextual pathways. We call these pathways "learning narratives", as they dynamically recollect dispersed web-resources and organize them into a coherent narrative, whose structure is inspired by perspectives commonly used when teaching philosophy (e.g. theoretical, historical, geographical, argumentative..)
Zdenek Zdrahal's participation in SILVER
SILVER
SILVER
2007-07-01
2010-04-30
Semantic Interactive Learning Visualisation Environment Research
The aim of the SILVER project is to develop educational software based on knowledge visualisation technology that will allow learners and educators to collect, organise, experiment and interact with multimedia assets. With the software, learners and teachers will be able to select multimedia assets related to a theme, visualise conceptual relationships associated with those assets and assemble them in different ways reflecting alternative perspectives.
The SILVER project is supported by the Technology Strategy Board and is a collaboration with the Bridgeman Art Library and Lexara. Bridgeman Art Library is the world's leading source of fine art, history and culture with some 260,000 images available on-line, plus 750,000 historical photographs, from 8000 locations. LEXARA is a company that develops technology-enabled products to support organisations in the publishing, education, corporate and cultural heritage sectors. SILVER is developing applications aimed at supporting both school and work-based learning.
Zdenek Zdrahal's participation in G-LEARN
G-LEARN
G-LEARN
2007-10-01
2009-09-30
Knowledge Transfer Partnership with the Milton Keynes City Discovery Centre
G-LEARN is the project name for our Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) with Milton Keynes City Discovery Centre (MKCDC). MKCDC is an educational organisation that develops urban geography learning materials and activities for schools and universities. The objective of G-LEARN is to design and develop an electronic resource to assist with school-level Key Stage 3 Human Geography learning and teaching. The project aims to use the case study of Milton Keynes to develop learning resources for use in schools nationally. The G-LEARN application is based around the decisions made during urban planning and draws on the educational and archive resources of MKCDC to illustrate the complexities and tradeoffs which urban policy makers and planners have to reconcile.
Zdenek Zdrahal's participation in Eurogene
Eurogene
Eurogene
2007-10-01
2010-09-30
The first Pan-European Learning Service in the Field of Genetics
EuroGene is a European Commission supported e-ContentPlus project concerned with providing high quality semantically enriched educational content in genetics. The objective of the EUROGENE project is to migrate toward the more efficient development of high quality didactic material on genetics through the guided editing and assembly of educational packages based on the IMS learning design metadata framework and the sharing of different types of learning objects between content owners, in 14 languages. The EuroGene consortium brings together16 partners in the field of genetics from 11 different countries.
The primary role of KMI within EuroGene is to apply tools and methods for content annotation, content authoring and assembly and the navigation different learning pathways through the available content.
Zdenek Zdrahal's participation in Bletchley Park Text
Bletchley Park Text
Bletchley Park Text
2008-05-20
Using mobile and semantic web technologies to support the post-visit use of online museum resources
The Bletchley Park Text system is an information service provided for visitors to Bletchley Park, the home of the British Government's Code and Cipher School during the Second World War. The Park is now a museum dedicated to telling the story of the work done there and the influence it has had on our modern day communications and computing technology.
Visitors to the museum identify the items of interest to them by sending SMS text messages containing keywords taken from labels on the exhibits. These messages are later used to select relevant resources, which are organised into a number of views and presented as a personalised website for the visitor to explore when they return home from their visit.
Zdenek Zdrahal's participation in Tech-It-Easy
Tech-It-Easy
Tech-It-Easy
2009-06-01
2011-05-31
information system, based on analytical and knowledge-based tools
The TECH-IT-EASY project will develop an information system, based on analytical and knowledge-based tools, able to support electromechanical European SMEs to in structuring and systematising the internal product innovation process. The result will be a fully operating information system, consisting of:
<ul>
<li>A methodological tool box to structure and define SMEs technology products, abstracting them from the specific industrial context, to allow the usage of external knowledge for technology innovation. Such methodological tool-box will be based on the combined application of QFD (Quality Function Deployment) market-pull approach with technologypush potentials of TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving).</li>
<li>An information agent that analyses digital information within the enterprise, at information providers, and on the Web. This system will work context-sensitive in terms of considering the role and the experience of the person that carries out the search as well as the current product under study. Such information agent will make usage of ontology as symbolic knowledge representation of the overall innovation knowledge domain.</li>
<li>An Innovation-Process support tool, to guide users through the whole innovation process, connecting the technology system related to the product under study with the knowledge base constituted by market and technology information (gathered through the information agent), and by a set of pre-acquired knowledge (such as the so-called "trends of evolution" of technological systems) allowing SMEs to identify innovation opportunities out of their internal knowledge</li>
</ul>Main Scientific Achievement will be the development of an information system that is able to deal with weakly structured content as well as formalized databases, such as the ones related to the overall innovation-process, and the structuring the overall innovation-process through the usage of ontologies as formal way of representing knowledge in a way understandable by machines.
Zdenek Zdrahal's participation in REF 2021 Predictions
REF 2021 Predictions
REF 2021 Predictions
2017-01-01
2021-01-01
Web-scale research analytics for identifying high performance and trends: data-driven approaches to Scientometrics.
Over the recent years, there has been a growing interest in developing new scientometric measures that go beyond the traditional citation-Ââ€based bibliometric measures. This interest is motivated on one side by the wider availability or even emergence of new information evidencing research performance, such as article downloads, views, and twitter mentions, and on the other side by the continued frustrations and problems surrounding the application of citation-Âbased metrics to evaluate research performance in practice.
The research looks into new ways of utilizing full-Âtexts of research papers to evaluate research impact at the granularity of individual papers, researchers as well as institutions. It will consider the evolution of evidence influencing research metrics in time and the emergence of new trends and new research communities as valuable signals.
Zdenek Zdrahal's participation in Eurogene Software
Eurogene Software
Eurogene Software
Eurogene e-learning system in the domain of genetics
Eurogene is an e-learning system in the domain of genetics that provides free multimedia learning resources in nine languages for statistical, medical and molecular genetics and delivers them to students and professionals. The Eurogene content includes presentations, reviewed research articles, images, videos and learning packages submitted by world-leading geneticists.
An essential part of the Eurogene system is a multilingual search engine that allows to search for content in one language while retrieving the results in other languages. This is complemented by the use of a machine translation system fine-tuned for genetic terminology. The search engine uses a query language similar to PubMed.
Eurogene also aims at providing intelligent ways of navigation through the e-Learning system. As new learning resources are being continuously submitted to the system, it is not possible to maintain links between them manually. Eurogene automatically links resources that are semantically similar using natural language processing.
Zdenek Zdrahal's participation in DECIPHER
DECIPHER
DECIPHER
2011-01-01
2013-12-31
Digital Environment for Cultural Interfaces; Promoting Heritage, Education and Research
Digital heritage and semantic web technologies hold out the promise of nearly unlimited access to cultural knowledge. The problem is that cultural meaning does not reside in individual objects but in the patterns of knowledge and events, belief and thought that link them to each other and to the observer. This is why story is so important to the communication of, and meaningful understanding of culture.
DECIPHER is developing new solutions to the whole range of narrative construction, knowledge visualisation and display problems. It will change the way people access digital heritage by combining much richer, event-based metadata with causal reasoning models.
This will result in a reasoning engine, virtual environment and interfaces that can help curators and visitors to present digital heritage objects as part of a coherent narrative that is directly related to the user's interests. This will allow the user to interactively assemble, visualise and explore, not just collections of objects, but the knowledge structures that connect and give them meaning.
Zdenek Zdrahal's participation in RETAIN
RETAIN
RETAIN
2011-03-01
2013-08-31
Retaining Students through Intelligent Interventions
The RETAIN project aims to extend the Open University’s existing Business Intelligence systems, with a particular focus on improving student retention. RETAIN will make it possible to integrate additional data sources, such as data from VLE’s, with existing statistical methods and to further extend the functionality by using predictive modelling to identify students who are at risk of non-completion of their courses. This will allow for better targeted interventions towards these students. A demonstrator will be developed, for visualising retention data that allows viewing of both aggregated and individual student data on selected dimensions. This will be usable by tutors and programme managers for determining strategy in both the short-term and long-term, on individual, course and faculty levels. The developed tools and methods will be trialled with a view to longer term uptake and further extensions to Business Intelligence functionality. The predicted benefits are improved retention and progression, leading to a financial cost savings for the OU and a better student experience.
Zdenek Zdrahal's participation in ServiceCORE
ServiceCORE
ServiceCORE
2011-11-01
2012-07-31
Services for Connected Repositories
The ServiceCORE project aims to develop a new nation-wide aggregation service that will improve the discovery of research publications stored across British Open Access repositories. The ServiceCORE project will extend the solution provided by the CORE system, developed in the first stage of the Resource Discovery programme. CORE is a pilot system that harvests both content and metadata from British repositories and makes them accessible through three applications - a Web portal, a Mobile application and a Plugin for institutional repositories. The ServiceCORE project will extend this system with:
(a) a new Web Service layer working on top of the CORE Linked Data repository, providing programmable access to both content and metadata,
(b) an enhanced related resource discovery system based on text-mining,
(c) a pilot tool for automatic subject-based classification of content using text categorisation techniques.
The ServiceCORE will also increase the CORE repository coverage to at least 80% of British OAI-PMH compliant repositories and will improve the policies for content updating.
Zdenek Zdrahal's participation in DiggiCORE
DiggiCORE
DiggiCORE
2012-01-01
2014-03-31
Digging into Connected Repositories
The goal of DiggiCORE is to analyse a vast set of research publications from the Open Access domain using natural language processing and social network analysis methods to identify patterns in the behaviour of research communities, to recognise trends in research disciplines, to learn new insights about the citation behaviours of researchers etc.
Zdenek Zdrahal's participation in FOSTER
FOSTER
FOSTER
2014-02-01
2016-01-31
Facilitate Open Science Training for European Research
FOSTER aims to support different stakeholders, especially young researchers, in adopting open access in the context of the European Research Area (ERA) and in complying with the open access policies and rules of participation set out for Horizon 2020 (H2020).
FOSTER will establish a European-wide training programme on open access and open data, consolidating training activities at downstream level and reaching diverse disciplinary communities and countries in the ERA.
The training programme will include different approaches and delivery options: elearning, blearning, self-learning, dissemination of training materials/contents, helpdesk, face-to-face training, especially training-the-trainers, summer schools, seminars, etc.
OBJECTIVES
- Support different stakeholders, especially young researchers, in adopting open access in the context of the European Research Area (ERA) and in complying with the open access policies and rules of participation set out for Horizon 2020;
- Integrate open access principles and practice in the current research workflow by targeting the young researcher training environment;
- Strengthen the institutional training capacity to foster compliance with the open access policies of the ERA and Horizon 2020 (beyond the FOSTER project);
- Facilitate the adoption, reinforcement and implementation of open access policies from other European funders, in line with the EC�s recommendation.
MAIN ACTIVITIES
1 � Identifying already existing contents that can be reused in the context of the training activities and repackaging, reformatting them to be used within FOSTER, and develop/create/ enhance contents if/where they are needed.
2 � Creation of the FOSTER Portal to support e-learning, blended learning, self-learning, dissemination of training materials/contents and Helpdesk.
3 � Delivery of face-to-face training, especially training trainers/multipliers that can carry on further training and dissemination activities, within their institutions, countries and/or disciplinary communities.
Project number: 612425
Start Date: 01/02/2014
Duration: 24 months
Funding from the EC: 1.499.860,00�
Zdenek Zdrahal's participation in Europeana Cloud
Europeana Cloud
Europeana Cloud
2013-02-01
2016-02-01
eCloud
Europeana Cloud is a Best Practice Network, submitted under Objective 2.1.a and coordinated by the Europeana Foundation, designed to establish a cloud-based system for Europeana and its aggregators. Europeana Cloud will provide new content, new metadata, a new linked storage system, new tools and services for researchers and a new platform - Europeana Research. Content providers and aggregators, across the European information landscape, urgently need a cheaper, more sustainable infrastructure that is capable of storing both metadata and content. Researchers require a digital space where they can undertake innovative exploration and analysis of Europe's digitised content. Europeana needs to get closer to the target of 30 million items by 2015. Europeana Cloud meets these needs.
The key objectives of Europeana Cloud are:
1. To provide access, at Europeana, to 1.1m new metadata records and 5m research focussed items from across European Universities, libraries, data centres and publishers;
2. To create a cloud based infrastructure capable of delivering cost-efficient content and metadata storage for
stakeholders across Europe;
3. To understand and incorporate the legal, strategic and economic issues of a
cloud-based system for content for cultural heritage institutions and domain aggregators;
4. To achieve a broad consensus among European content aggregators and research networks on the advantages of a cloud based solution;
5. To develop a digital platform, named Europeana Research, to discover and use Europeana research
content;
6. Via this cloud to provide tools and services for researchers that permit innovative research that exploits digitised content in Europeana. This is a vital project for the Europeana network of content providers
and aggregators, moving to an infrastructure that can deal not just with descriptive metadata but actual digitised content as well.
Zdenek Zdrahal's participation in UK Aggregation
UK Aggregation
UK Aggregation
2013-10-01
2014-02-28
Developing the UK Aggregator of Open Access metadata and content from repository systems
UK Aggregation will provide technology for aggregating metadata and content from UK institutional repositories to be used as a component of the Jisc Repository Shared Services Infrastructure. The resulting aggregation will be used as a building block to satisfy various use cases, such as (a) the provision of a centrally managed cache of metadata and content for search engine optimisation, (b) the delivery of source data
for text-mining from open access papers, (c) the monitoring of metadata (OpenAire, RIOXX) or open access policy compliance (HEFCE. RCUK) or (d) the analysis of growth and usage of repository data. In technical terms, the project will build on the existing CORE aggregator, which is already largely in a service ready state. Therefore, the project will largely focus on integration and interoperability of the aggregation service with relevant services maintained by different stakeholders. It will consult these stakeholders and propose an integration plan that will be realised in the next stage (after the end of this project). Finally, the project team will, based on consultations with Jisc, decide on the economical and governance structure under
which the service will operate in the future.
Zdenek Zdrahal's participation in OU Analyse
OU Analyse
OU Analyse
2013-08-01
2015-07-31
The OU Analyse project is piloting new machine learning based methods for early identification of students who are at risk of failing.
A list of such students is communicated weekly to the module and Student Support teams to help them consider appropriate support. The overall objective is to significantly improve the retention of OU students. This is 'research-led' as the project builds on previous experience from the Jisc funded Retain in 2010/2011 and the joint OU-Microsoft Research Cambridge project in 2012/2013.
The work is innovative in that it is applying machine learning techniques to two types of data: student demographic data and dynamic data represented by their VLE activities. Records of previous presentations are used to build and validate predictive models, which are then applied to the data of the presentation currently running.
Zdenek Zdrahal's participation in CAT: Curriculum Analytics Tool
CAT: Curriculum Analytics Tool
CAT: Curriculum Analytics Tool
2017-09-01
Application for faculty representatives to analyse the curriculum
CAT stands for Curriculum Analytics Tool. It is an application developed at KMi originally for STEM representatives to analyse the curriculum with the goal of being used at all the faculties. The system enables data oriented view of the qualifications and modules, combining financial data with retention and progression. This data is available in the visual analytics dashboard application. Our plan is to apply various analytics and machine learning techniques in order to provide deeper analysis of how students progress across the qualifications, where are the main issues and how to improve them.
Zdenek Zdrahal's participation in FOSTER (fosteropenscience.eu)
FOSTER (fosteropenscience.eu)
FOSTER (fosteropenscience.eu)
2014-02-01
FOSTER was a coordination initiative that promoted the integration of open access principles and practice in the current research workflow.
FOSTER's Objectives:
- support a culture change, whereby the practical aspects of Open Science are fully implemented and ultimately rewarded, by providing an advanced-level, outcome-oriented training programme based on courses and activities for which participants can attain digital badges;
- consolidate and sustain a training support network comprised of Open Science ambassadors from a range of research performing organisations and research infrastructures;
- strengthen the training capacity by addressing the current skills and content gaps, both at community/discipline and institutional levels, on the practical implementation of Open Science.