Information Science

Talat's experience in information science is derived from his work as a researcher in research information, research data, metadata, and publications management. He works for Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru (The University of Wales Dictionary) in the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies.

He previously worked at UKOLN in the University of Bath and in Information Services at Aberystwyth University as its first repository manager. He has been a freelance consultant and Technical Manager at Morgan Price Networks.

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• Research Identifiers
• Research Data
• Research Information Management
• Technical Advice
• Repository Management
• Metadata
• Events and Community Engagement
• Cultural Heritage
• Other Experience

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Research Identifiers

Talat has advised on research information policy at a national strategic level. In 2012-13 he was on the JISC Unique Research Identifiers Task and Finish Group, a committee with representation from RCUK, HEFCE, HESA, ORCID, the British Library, JISC, UKOLN and others. He has been involved in policy discussions related to identifiers for academic institutions and their organisational units.

Research Data

Talat's work at UKOLN has given him considerable experience of emerging issues related to research data deposit, curation and metadata, including those arising from large data sets from multidisciplinary sources in the sciences and humanities. He currently maintains a test instance of the CKAN data management platform. He views effective management of data sets in the higher education sector as the next biggest intellectual and economic challenge facing universities after research information management information about researchers, projects, funding cycles and organisational units.

Research Information Management

He initiated and co-led a successful funding application for the CERIFy project, which received £100K funding from JISC in 2011. He also worked as a researcher on the project, which engaged with four UK higher education institutions to develop their research information management activities and business processes, and to advise them on issues relating to the REF and Current Research Information Systems (CRIS).

He worked with partners from Trinity College Dublin in order to import research metadata from the four universities into their in-house CRIS software using the European metadata standard CERIF, and with the publisher Thomson Reuters in developing software solutions to make their commercial product Research In View compatible with CERIF and to enrich the research information using Web of Science / Web of Knowledge.

He ran and co-led workshops and interviewed university staff across academic and support departments of the four universities in order to produce data assessing their business processes and recommendations for their improvement.

Technical Advice

He has considerable experience of research information and publications management software, including CRIS systems and repositories. As part of the Technical Foundations project, 2011-13, he produced technical guidance for the UK higher education sector about available technologies, software and cutting-edge technical developments and solutions, including metadata standards and research identifiers. He also procured and edited content on areas such as digital preservation and digital curation, scientific metadata and data sets, and knowledge organisation systems.

Repository Management

As Aberystwyth University's first repository manager, he developed and steered university policy through the Research Committee on mandatory deposit of theses and dissertations, launched and maintained the repository as a front-line university service, and was responsible for copyright and intellectual property issues as well as for mediated submittions, copyright checking, advocacy, training and advising on Open Access strategy, academic publishing, copyright management and publishing contracts. As an early repository pioneer and early member of UKCoRR, he produced the deposit and take-down policies for the repository in consultation with senior staff. In this role, he represented Information Services on staff-student consultative committees in order to raise awareness, integrate the repository with other technical services and practices, and improve service provision.

He was responsible for providing information to academics both through developing the web site and through personally meeting with staff across the university, both individually and collectively, and with heads of department and heads of research, in order to develop usage of the repository. He negotiated the import of records from the former Institute of Grassland Research (IGER) into the institutional repository on its merger into the university, as well as metadata relating to publications from the university's REF database.

He has worked with DSpace and is familiar with EPrints and Fedora repository platforms and similar products and software, both open source and commercial. He is also familiar with related digital asset management software such as Greenstone, CKAN, CRIS systems etc.

Metadata

Talat has worked extensively on practical applications of metadata research. He sat on the advisory board and architecture board of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) and was co-moderator of the DC Scholarly Communications community during 2009-13. He led various workshops in 2009-11, as outlined below. He worked on the Application Profiles Support project from 2008 to 2011, and produced and edited guidance materials on metadata, knowledge organisation systems and related technical developments for the UK higher education sector as part of the Technical Foundations project, 2011-13. He worked with the CERIF standard for research information management as part of the CERIFy project, 2011.

He has considerable experience in a wide range of XML and RDF technologies, metadata standards and semantic web technologies, including for example Microformats, Microdata, schema.org, Description Set Profiles and FOAF.

Events and Community Engagement

In addition to his community engagement work in the areas outlined above, e.g. metadata, repositories and research management, he led workshops on practical metadata prototyping at IWMW 2009, the Edinburgh Repository Fringe 2009 and at DC-2009 in Seoul. He co-organised and co-led the "Picture This!" hack day event at Dev8D+ in 2011, aimed at bringing developers and practitioners together in order to make practical solutions for issues surrounding metadata across the higher education community, including geospatial data, images, time-based media and educational resources.

Cultural Heritage

Talat's long-standing personal background in a range of areas of cultural heritage provides a productive context for his knowledge of digital preservation and curation issues and related technologies. He speaks several languages, and has a deep interest in their culture, history and literature, particularly minority languages and cultures. His academic specialism is in the Celtic languages and cultures. He retains an interest in history, especially the post-Roman period, and in archaeology. He has taught Welsh and Breton and contributes to a voluntary organisation which provides information and educational activities related to their linguistic and cultural heritage.

See this one minute video by Talat on cultural heritage issues.

Other Experience

Talat has wide-ranging experience as an editor and reviewer, including web content, academic publications, funding applications and bids, dissertations and theses, and technical translation work (including software translation). He is an authority on a wide and diverse range of web and server technologies such as social networking platforms, distributed networks, instant messaging standards, virtual worlds and the 3D web, and library information systems. He has been part of a group at UKOLN pioneering good practice in remote working using web technologies.

 

Last updated: 21 May 2024