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Project Name: An Open Source Environment to construct Information Services for Children
Abbreviation: PuppyIR Start date:
April 1, 2009 End date:
April 1, 2012 Project Description:
PuppyIR is an FP7 project (INFSO-IST-231507) that that will help
children search the Internet
safely and successfully by the design of an Open-Source platform of
child-friendly information services.
Consortium members are: University of Twente,
University of Glasgow,
University of Strathclyde,
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven,
AMC/Emma Kinderziekenhuis,
Vereniging Openbare Bibliotheken,
Atos Origin and
Technical University Delft.
Coordination and contact: Franciska de Jong
The Project Website is: www.puppyir.eu
Vacancies:
Open positions in PuppyIR at partner institutes:
Department Computing Science, University of
Glasgow,
Intelligence &
Information Retrieval group, KU Leuven
Objectives:
As adults we are keen to help children maximize their full potential.
Developing children’s abilities to find and understand information is
key their development as young adults. The Internet offers children
exciting new ways to meet people, learn about different cultures and
develop their creative potential. However, children’s ability to use
the Internet is severely hampered by the lack of appropriate search
tools.
Most Information Retrieval (IR) systems are designed for adults:
they return information in a form that is unsuitable for children,
present information in lists that children find difficult to manage
and make it difficult for children to identify the relevant parts.
Worse, almost all Internet search engines confront children with
inappropriate material.
PuppyIR will provide a suite of components that can be used by system
designers to tailor IR systems for their specific needs. PuppyIR will
develop new interaction paradigms that allow children to express
their
information needs simply and have results presented in an intuitive
way. It will develop Information Services that can summarise content
for children, moderate information for children, help children safely
build social networks and intelligently aggregate for presentation to
children. PuppyIR will also contribute to the evaluation of
children’s
IR systems by the development of child-centered evaluation methods.
PuppyIR will be a multi-layered architecture: system designers can
choose from several interaction paradigms and information services to
construct their own system. As PuppyIR is Open-Source it will be
extensible for new information sources, new information services and
new languages.
PuppyIR offers a package for designers to construct usable IR systems
for children and the opportunity for children to fully exploit the
Internet.
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