The Invisible Web Weblog

Recently I attended the annual European Conference on Information Retrieval ( ECIR 2006 ) in London. The conference took place at Imperial College London between Monday 10th and Wednesday 12th April 2006. It was very useful to find out about the current issues and trends in IR research.

The 6th European Summer School in Information Retrieval ( ESSIR 2007 ) will be held in Glasgow, hosted by the Information Retrieval Group of the Department of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow.

I attended a wonderful workshop at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth from 6th to 7th April. I delivered a presentation about my research. It was the third doctoral forum that I have attended during my PhD study. I like this kind of doctoral forums because it provides us with an opportunity to simply talk to other fellow researchers from different universities and learn new things from them. I’ll write more about the workshop in the next entries. I have uploaded some photos that I took in Aberystwyth on my homepage here and here .

Sir Tim Berners-Lee the inventor of the web, director of the World Wide Web Consortium, Senior Researcher at MIT's CSAIL, and Professor of Computer Science at Southampton ECS presented a lecture about the future of the web at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII). If you wish to listen to this lecture have a look here . I am listening to the lecture through this link now and am excited because of having a chance to hear the voice of the inventor of the web on the web. It is difficult to say how wonderful the web is. Obviously, now we can not imagine everyday life without the web. It is so interwoven with many aspects of the life. You know better than me anyway.

Today is Nowrouz which is the celebration time for the arrival of Persian New Years day. I congratulate it to all readers of this Weblog. Twenty first of March is the beginning of spring and the beginning of official year in my country. Although I am in England now and working as a normal day in my office, Nowrouz is a very special day for me and I always feel it in my heart wherever I am in 21 of March.

I remember in 1999 when I was going to decide on my MA dissertation in LIS my first choice was developing criteria for evaluation of websites in general and for library websites in particular. I even wrote a paper on this issue seven years ago. It was a new topic in those days and I was very enthusiastic about it. Nevertheless, regretfully I changed my mind and did my master research on users’ satisfaction on computerised facilities on academic libraries. Of course users’ satisfaction also was a very interesting topic to research and I liked the idea and still do. However, I also like the idea of source evaluation on the web because it seems to me a fruitful ground for research. Despite the fact that many papers have been published on this issue and we know much about it, still many web users are not aware of its importance. This site is an example of thousands resources that would be useful to learn about it. The site is one of the early ones that I have seen but still one of the best...

To all interested in the upcoming ITiCSE 2006 conference in Bologna, Italy, June 26-28, 2006.