Curriculum Vitae

Keith Jeffery is currently Head of Information Systems Engineering Division at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in UK. His Division has groups working in Knowledge Engineering, Software Engineering, Data Engineering, User Interfaces, Workflow and Cooperative Work and Advanced Hypermedia Systems. Almost all the staff are funded by contract research and development projects, funded by the EC (European Commission) , EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council), commerce and industry.

Keith has extensive experience in consultancy, project management and product development both within the public sector and the commercial sector. He has been involved actively in EC-funded projects as coordinator, system architect and in technical and exploitation roles.

Keith holds a BSc in Geology, a PhD in Geology (with a very large computing content!) and is a Fellow of both the Geological Society of London and the British Computer Society. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Irish Computer Society. He is a trustee (past secretary and currently vice-president) of the Endowment Board of the VLDB (Very Large Database) Conference, and is a member of the boards controlling the EDBT (Extending Database Technology) conference, CASE (Conference on Advanced Systems Engineering) conference and OOIS (Object-Oriented Information Systems) conference. He is a member of the SOFSEM Steering Committee. He serves on several programme committees for international and national conferences, he reviews material for journals and books and reviews research proposals for several countries. He has numerous publications in refereed journals, books and conference proceedings. He holds the positions of Honorary Professor of Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University, Honorary Professor of Computer Science at University College of Wales, Cardiff, Honorary Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic and Senior Visiting Fellow in Computer Science at the University of Birmingham.

The future of CRIS.

Keynote - Plenary Session

There is a real need for CRIS. Just about everyone believes such systems should assist technology transfer and wealth-creation through innovation and partnerships for better quality R&D. However, CRIS are not much used when compared with other information sources. Although the potential audience for CRIS is not as large as that for world news (e.g. CNN or BBC), nor sport, weather, entertainment or financial market prices, nonetheless it would be reasonable to expect everyone in the R&D community (sensu lato) to access CRIS perhaps once or twice per week. At the moment we are not achieving such a target for CRIS by several orders of magnitude. What is wrong?

At the Amsterdam CRIS'93 conference I predicted the overwhelming success of WWW and advocated use of WWW as a way to improve utilisation of CRIS - in Campus-Wide Information Systems. At the Milan CRIS'95 conference I urged that we should use WWW to bring CRIS 'into the light'. At both I argued for metadata-assisted easy-to-use user interfaces and hypermedia results presentation. I explained the use of metadata for data exchange and global query over heterogeneous distributed information sources in other information domains. What has happened in the years since then?

Try any query for one or more chosen R&D terms on one of the web search engines. CRIS-provided information won't show up (but news items will, articles in abstracting journals might and many 'false hits' will). Many CRIS providers still take the view that they provide a library-type service and that the users will register with them and use their service. Why are CRIS invisible?

The information world changed 4 years ago, yet CRIS suppliers (with one or two notable exceptions) have hardly noticed. If metadata describing the information available in an information provider system is not visible on the web, the information itself is invisible to the world. People do not have time, energy or motivation to find information from suppliers with arcane access procedures. The importance of metadata cannot be underestimated - in both commercial and publicity terms. The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) current work in this field is providing the world standard, yet CRIS suppliers are invisible in the specification work. Why are CRIS not driving the standard?

Metadata allows for intelligently-assisted querying, online help and intelligent interpretation of results. Metadata helps in quality control of input data. Metadata allows systems to exchange information or participate in global queries over heterogeneous distributed systems. Metadata can advertise information. Metadata is in every sense the gateway to CRIS. The future of CRIS is - in a word - 'metadata'.

Download his Full paper or his Presentation