Technical Meeting to Review the Functionality of the Nuclear Knowledge Portal, 20 to 23 June 2005,  Vienna, Austria          


Technical  Working Material 

Background 

In October 2004, the Technical Meeting to “Develop a Nuclear Knowledge Portal for the Integration of Existing Nuclear Data and Information Bases (in the Agency and in Member States)”, was held in Vienna. The full report of the Meeting is available at: http://www.iaea.org/km/documents/tm_nkp2004.pdf

In particular, the participants of the 2004 Technical Meeting recommended that: 

  • The Agency’s Nuclear Knowledge Portal (NKP) activities need participation from all Departments, including MTIT for some of the technical aspects.

  • Consensus about the allocation of responsibilities must be sought between stakeholders in order to achieve broad acceptance of the project.

  • There should be only one entry point to the Agency’s NKP, but responsibility and ownership for specific parts of the contents should remain with the organizational units who specialize or focus on the relevant disciplines.

  • Based on its expertise and mission, the INIS & NKM Section should have particular responsibility concerning the coordination and overall implementation of the Portal.

  • INIS’ nuclear thesaurus is a unique resource that should be utilized for the development of a set of common taxonomies. Classification systems, on the other hand (the example of the classification system for the Nuclear Safety Portal was discussed in some detail), must be specific for their intended usage and should merely take advantage of the underlying taxonomies for purposes of automation.

  • External contributions from Member States should be sought and encouraged.

The experts requested that the immediate follow-up activities should include: 

  • To develop a formal project brief for the development of an Agency wide nuclear knowledge portal,

  • To seek discussions with all departments, concerning the distribution of responsibilities, tasks; and

  • To re-enforce ongoing work on nuclear taxonomies.

In 2005, the Director General charged the IAEA’s Division of Information Technology (MTIT) with the realization of important components of the Portal in collaboration with the INIS & Nuclear Knowledge Management Section. The present Technical Meeting will review the ongoing developments and provide further guidance concerning the implementation of the Portal.

Purpose:

  • Guide the Agency in the development and implementation of the Portal; and

  • Test and evaluate prototypes of components of the Portal.

Output: 

  • A written review and recommendation on the initial contents, functionality and steps taken towards the IAEA’s Nuclear Knowledge Portal.

  • Test and evaluate prototypes of components of the Portal.

In the long term it is expected that the outcome of the Meeting will be a:

  • Contribution to improved access to nuclear knowledge in Member States.

Participants are expected to:

  • Inspect and evaluate the status of the Agency’s Portal Project,

  • Test MTIT’s prototype software of the Portal,

  • Confirm the development path taken, or recommend corrections where appropriate ; and

  • Draft a report that evaluates the present developments and that recommends further actions to be taken.