Kei Kurakawa

Digital library for scholarly communications on the Web is the current research topic. In recent years, I worked on researcher identifier management system, the Researcher Name Resolver, which provides researcher identifiers for Japanese researchers. The identifiers are used to identify authors in digital libraries, such as institutional repositories for both publications and data. I was also a lead developer of KAKEN, a database of Grants-in Aid for Scientific Research in Japan. It characteristically provided researcher pages to list their achievements. Identifiers of scholarly digital objects and creators become the key to analyze structure of knowledge and research trends. Currently, I am working on author name disambiguation by means of machine learning techniques, and try to invent new infrastructures for sharing research data. My research interests include information technology to develop digital library systems on the Web and analyze the nature of research. The keywords are Web-oriented technology, semantic web, information retrieval, machine learning, and statistical models. Past research interests were design science, design engineering, user interface, groupware and software engineering. These fundamental researches affect my current works as a basis for that digital library systems development.