ACCESS TO QUALITY RESOURCES ON RUSSIA Tanja Pursiainen, University of Helsinki, Aleksanteri institute. EVA 2004 Moscow, 29 November 2004

Background in Finland alone 36 organizations, providing, maintaining or distributing information on Russia The service is to provide easy access to relevant resources for the following user communities: academics, government officials, business community and media Ministry of Education of Finland: these resources to be gathered under one umbrella web information service The project started in the summer 2003 The service to be opened to the public autumn 2005

Examples of Resources Library catalogues Helka, National Library of Finland, Slavonic Collection :: Full text documents (articles, reports, analyses) The Finnish Institute of International Affairs : Aleksanteri Institute, the Finnish Centre for Russian and East European: Studies, University of Helsinki Bank of Finland, Institute for Economies in Transition The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy, ETLA Helsinki School of Economics, Center for Markets in Transition University of technology, Lappeenranta Turku School of Economics University of Lapland, Arctic Centre …..

Web directories Balticdata NNSS South Carelian Polytechnic, Russia information service Examples of Resources Web information services Northern Dimension Advisory Network Balticdata :: Barents Information Service Lapponica database KUKA database Humanities HUB, Slavonic studies ::.....

Basic Functionality Resource 2Resource N USER QUERY HELKA Metadata card database Resource 1

Metadescription of heterogeneous resources Dublin Core, augmented by one field Tailored to sufficiently describe full-text documents (also paper ”twins” of web publications), Web resources, library catalogues’ entries

Metadescription of heterogeneous resources Title Creator Subject Subject (keywords) Description Publisher Source Identifier Rights Date issued Date modified Country of origin Coverage temporal Coverage spatial Type Format Language

Metadescription of heterogeneous resources Title Creator Subject Subject (keywords) Description Publisher Source Identifier Rights Date issued Date modified Country of origin Coverage temporal Coverage spatial Type Format Language

Metadescription of heterogeneous resources Title Creator Subject Subject (keywords) Description Publisher Source Identifier Rights Date issued Date modified Country of origin Coverage temporal Coverage spatial Type Format Language

Generating Metadata Manual annotation Automatic harvesting/extraction Combination of the three In the future: consultations for providers, higher degree of automation

Generating Metadata Provider’s web page URL list PDF HTML DOC PDF HTML DOC Provider’s metadata Metadata extraction Extracted metadata + Harvested metadata + manual annotation New resource? Metadata card database RUSSIAinfo

Thesauri Eurovoc Multilinguisity Interoperability VESA: The Universal Thesaurus of the Finnish language Reflects Finnish way of constructing reality Interoperable with Finnish National Library Catalogue, HELKA Dynamically generates terms in the Helsinki University’s publishing system Machine readable ontology of the Finnish language to be created on its basis

Browsing Features Geographical focus: Russian Federation, all regions Subject classification: 1. Public Administration 2. Politics 3. Economics 4. Social services & Health care 5. Education and Research 6. Culture 9. Civil Society 10. Environment Browsing by: subject, geographical area, document type Content languages: english, finnish, russian, others by relevance Interface languages: english, finnish, russian

Browsing Features Support elements for subject browsing: Looking for: statistics reports and analysis newspaper articles legislation etc. Popular in this category: Concept trees: (RUSSIAinfo subject classification) Economics Travel Culture Travel Politics equality Social services equality Civil society equality

Search Features Search in: english, finnish, russian Key word search: Eurovoc, VESA, free Advanced search: by any metacard field Semantic relations between key words: micro thesauri (from Eurovoc, VESA)

Future Perspectives The Working Space for Russia scholars RUSSIA subject gateway for NELLI, and via NELLI (or as such) into global systems :: Resources reusable in SW systems Mobile interface Knowledge management infrastructure for the Cross Border University

THANK YOU! helsinki.fi/aleksanteri helsinki.fi/university Tanja Pursiainen, University of Helsinki, Aleksanteri institute. EVA 2004 Moscow, 29 November 2004