Mining the Mountain: UK Universities are Uniquely Placed to Re-Energise the Economy by Using Their Vast Data and Knowledge Assets to Drive Innovation. Vic Lyte and Sophia Jones Explain How Meaning-Based Computing can Help the UK to Harness the True Value of Academic Bibliographic Data and Expertise Assets (Academic‪)‬

Meet Susan. She's a researcher who submits a proposal to study an area relating to the use of spectroscopy to better understand stem cells. She is trying to isolate the key variables underlying such studies. So she goes to Google Scholar and focuses her preliminary search on the subject-specific terms "stem cells and spectroscopy". Google Scholar returns with a daunting list of 50,400 artefacts ranked according to the number of contextually unrelated hits rather than the focus of inquiry Susan is seeking. And that's just the stuff that Google knows about. Far more is hidden within the UK's 106 institutional university repositories, which hold over half a million artefacts. There is a vast quantity of information residing within UK universities and tapping it effectively is the toughest of nuts to crack. Susan's frustration in trying to find a needle in a haystack is shared by academics and researchers all over the country.