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What We Do - R&D in Future Technology for the Web

We are able to provide technical development expertise and R&D work for a range of projects.

If you have a project idea and wish to either collaborate with us in seeking to fund and implement it, or you wish to find out what areas of innovation we can help advise you in (for example to support your research methodology) then you are welcome to contact Web Futures Coordinator Nikki Rogers (nikki.rogers@bristol.ac.uk).

Our Web Futures team comprises senior technical researchers who have been working with innovative, leading edge technologies over many years. Our R&D experience has been developed over a number of large and small-scale projects and we regularly seek funding from European and UK research funding councils.

We take on projects that seek answers to questions such as:

• What would a research portal for the University of Bristol look like?
• How might researchers and students personalise the tools they use?
• How can social software be developed to assist the work of a researcher?
• How can security best be preserved in tools used by virtual organisations of researchers?

The latest Web Futures news, and updates from the team are available on our blog

Examples of our work:

Practice as Research in Performance (PARIP)
PARIP Explorer is a rich graphical client interface to a Web Service that allows querying and updating of a FOAF (Friend of a Friend) database of drama research.

This real-world application of the Semantic Web serves as both an extensible record of performance research as well as providing a creative environment for interactively discovering and describing relationships between that research.

Iugo: Conference Information Integration Project
The new knowledge generated during discussions, conference panel sessions and workshops is often lost to anyone unable to attend. Increasingly though, this information is being captured: keynote presentations are videoed; delegates make blog entries; session Internet Relay Chat discussions are recorded. These and other informal outputs can be very valuable. However, they can be hard to track down as few are linked to official conference sites.

Iugo offers a proof of concept system that lets you link informally-generated web-based content (and references to non web-based content) for a whole event and for individual sessions within that event.