Technology Surveillance

Last modified by Florian Matthes Feb 8, 2017

Objective

The main goal of the project is develop a Model for Technology Surveillance (TS) in the university environment using the Web 2.0 technologies. For the development of the model is considered the main problems of the traditional TS approach. Also, are considered the advantage and mitigation forms that can be obtained from the Web 2.0 technologies for the university context. The main tasks are:

Describe the goals, activities and roles of traditional TS approaches together with typical problems that are encountered when the activities are performed in practice, particularly in a research context.
Study the most important Web 2.0 technologies and their application in enterprises and organizations.
Develop a theoretical model of TS process supported by the Web 2.0 technologies.
Demonstrate how the model developed can be applied in practice using an existing commercial web based collaboration platform: Tricia.
Create a hybrid recommender systems model for technological surveillance based on the semantic Web and Web 2.0 technologies.
Implement a recommender component that provides useful information to users based in the basic information associated to their.
Implement mechanisms to obtain data from different sources on the Web and from user profile for the recommendations.
Provide user interfaces components and storage mechanisms that allow provide useful recommendation to user with an easy interaction.

Current Activities

Exhaustive prototyping model based on Technology Surveillance for the university context using Tricia platform.
Study of information processing techniques (text mining and data mining) for integration within the Technology Surveillance models.
Study different recommenders systems approach and their possible combination in a single component.
Work in the implementation of a recommendations component in the commercial enterprise collaboration platform Tricia.

Background

Technology surveillance (TS) can be seen as a particular branch of knowledge management (KM) primarily focusing on technology related information. It constitutes a systematic process including the activities of gathering, organizing, analyzing, and disseminating information from internal and external sources to assist organizations in managing risks in their operational and strategic environment. We focus on TS in a university environment where different departments, research groups and individual researchers critically depend on up-to-date technology-related information in their field.

Today, the actors in the TS process are challenged with an exponential growth of scientific knowledge and technology related information. However, the fact that all of this information is available in digital formats and the trend that it is increasingly available free of charge or at low prices offers many new opportunities. We suggest an approach for TS that helps universities to seize these opportunities and to master the challenges using proven Web 2.0 technologies. Besides, a hybrid recommender system will provide more efficient support to TS user, closing the gap between the external information and the user needs in academic context.