INSPIRE

The INSPIRE Virtual Research Environment (VRE) responds to the needs raised by developers of the INSPIRE service.

This new repository for High-Energy Physics (HEP), a research infrastructure in itself, intends to offer to its worldwide users of over 30,000+ scientists, more complex functionality than earlier HEP repositories, which had technical, architectural, and computational limitations. Part of this new functionality is based on computationally intensive processing of bibliometric information for advanced information search and retrieval through the exploitation of multi-dimensional search spaces and for assessing the impact of scientific results through hybrid metrics. Instead of adopting a “silo mentality” and solving these problems in-house by adding their own processing power and hard-wired algorithms, INSPIRE designers have opted for exploiting the D4Science facilities.

Two main areas are being explored, both requiring computational intensive applications performing sophisticated analyses on the whole corpus of the HEP literature:

• Mining of bibliometric data, such as co-authorship, cites-cited pairs as well as contextual information on the citation in order to offer multi-dimensional searching capabilities. Example applications are the exploration of social-science models describing the construction of scientific networks, the design, tuning and implementation of algorithms to identify experts in the field e.g. to automatically suggest referees/evaluators free from conflicts of interests, the discovery of cross-disciplinary links which are worth pursuing but are hidden in a few precursory works.
• Calculation of hybrid metrics to assess the impact of an article, a dataset, an individual, an institution, or a country by combining conventional impact metrics and integrating "new" information, such as server logs, text-mining for references beyond citations (i.e. names or quotes).

The VRE created by D4Science-II will be accessible programmatically and will provide the virtual context, i.e. appropriate content, tools and computational resources, for supporting the INSPIRE service. As a result, INSPIRE will not face any large computational bottleneck (maintenance, processing power, and expertise) when providing such innovative functionality. Moreover, the tools developed in this VRE will become available to other communities facing similar problems in other environments.

Note: This scenario responds to the concrete demands of the scientific community, which plans to make the final outcome of D4Science-II available in its own production working environment at the end of the project.