What are communities? Communities in DRIVER are a means towards a collaborative enviroment. Currently, they only consist of a set of collections and a group of subscribed users. which users can use in their searches or enter in their profiles for further use. collectively in their searches to receive more specialized results. More over, recan subcribe to The DRIVER Information Space gathers documents from different scientific subjects and from distinct geographical areas. DRIVER collections offer a way to organize such heterogeneous Space into a hierarchy of sets whose documents share similar features and properties. They are mostly dynamic, i.e., the number of documents changes as documents enter or leave the Information Space.

Who can create communities? Currently, communities are “public”, i.e. defined by DRIVER administrators, and we urge you to provide us with some feedback on what types of communities may be useful to your group, work or research (please send us your request at helpdesk@driver-support.eu).

How can communities be used? End-users may choose to run queries over communities, thus improving the precision of their search results. Also, registered users may subscribe to communities so that -if they choose to- all their queries are filtered through the assigned collections. Finally, communities are used in notification mechanisms so that users are alerted when changes in collections occur.

What can we expect in future enhancemnents? In the next release of the DRIVER infrastructure, communities will be the main container for the collaborative environment in the DRIVER end-user functionality vision. There are plans for:

• automatically identifying communities based on non-registered user queries and preferences
• creating a collaborative enviroment where users will be referring to common DRIVER collections or documents
• generating community and personalized recommendations based on distinct members behaviour and interactions
• generating personalized and community alerts and notifications based on overall community behaviour and changes
• active knowledge discovery: linking documents and other types of data belonging to enhanced publications will be part of the community container

Additional functionalities may be added, and we would like to hear your opinion. Please, do send us your feedback at helpdesk@driver-support.eu.

See all DRIVER Communities...