Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Dundee
SerenA: : A multi-site pervasive agent environment that supports serendipitous discovery in research
SerenA is the name of the RCUK Digital Economy Project that is designed to create an effective research space of the future, a ‘Serendipitous Arena’. This paper describes the underlying system as a multi-site, pervasive, agent environment that supports devices designed to connect to it and enable serendipitous discovery in research. The research which starts from the premise, that human users cannot be aware of all the research information that is relevant to their work, because of compartmentalisation of research into fields around particular journals, and, simply, because there is too much to know. In particular, the Semantic Web provides a resource which can assist, but there is more to be discovered than the things that a user might deliberately search for to achieve their current goal. SerenA, then, attempts to assist researchers by presenting them with information that they did not know they needed to know about their research through interactions with devices in varying contexts (in public, in private and in everyday contexts). Interactors were conceived, designed, prototyped and iterated, and this development cycle defined the final services for the underlaying SerenA system described in the paper.
