FUTURE-GAZING: projects and technologies for the content industry to watch

In this month?s EPS Focus Report, we look to the future and profile five emerging technologies that will have an impact on publishing over the next 2-5 years. The selected technologies have been selected from very different areas of research, but they are all expected to influence the way in which content is accessed, distributed, viewed, or stored. And where such technological change occurs, a new content or service opportunity is likely to emerge.

Projects chosen

The five research areas, and the technologies EPS has profiled in relation to these areas, are:

• Textual analysis of journal articles

Argumentative Zoning: a project that looks at automatic analysis and classification information held within the text of scientific articles. Applications include the creation of ?citation maps?, showing which other scientists an author has cited and in what context, and the automatic and tailored summarisation of scientific articles.

• Collaborative working

Sparrow Web: a collaborative web publishing tool, that allows multiple authors to edit, create and share documents within parameters set by the original author of the document.

• Managing document collections

Knowledge Extraction from Document Collections (KXDC): a project which addresses the problem of maintaining the quality of inter-related documents within a database, using natural language processing to extract meaning from unstructured text. The project additionally focuses on automatically combining knowledge from within related documents.

• Paper-like displays

SmartPaper: a lightweight and flexible electronic display that approximates the look of a sheet of paper for displaying content.

• Satellite navigation systems

GALILEO European Satellite Navigation System: the first satellite navigation system developed exclusively for civilian purposes, and which will challenge the effective monopoly of the US GPS satellite navigation system.