Researchers at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) have been working to expand and enhance Meta - a free research discovery tool from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative - in terms of both content coverage and how researchers access and use the data. Together with researchers around the world, they co-designed and prototyped how best to identify, aggregate, organize, and link the most complete set of resources and output types in support of a specific field.
The researchers used the prototype to run experiments to test or validate ideas, design assumptions, and other aspects of the conceptualization so the team could make refinements or even reorient based on feedback from the research community.
The prototype was leveraged specifically to address one of the biggest challenges researchers face: entering a new field of research. This is a common need. Diving deep into the literature, and finding the right research papers, reviews, and protocols to get up to speed with an unfamiliar topic can be overwhelming and time-consuming.
The development of the prototype was a valuable learning experience. It helped the internal team at CZI understand how best to ingest and process data across a wide variety of repositories and content types, employ a mix of programmatic and expert curation to review the data, and understand usability challenges in making the content available to researchers.
The team is also looking forward to applying their learning to diversify Meta’s knowledge graph and to expand the search and discovery capabilities on Meta.org.
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