René Olivieri, Chief Executive of Blackwell Publishing and Trustee of the Tubney Charitable Trust, paid a brief visit to KMi today as part of an in-depth visit to the OU.

The overall visit, organised by Sarah Jarman of the OU Development Office, had several goals, focussed on highlighting the scale and quality of the OU’s current research programmes, especially the OU’s work within the emerging Earth Sciences Centre of Excellence and specifically the Ecosystems Research Group.

KMi is already working with the Department of Earth Sciences on ClimatePrediction.net, and engaged in important work on scholarly publishing and debate, so these projects were also featured during the visit.

Martin Dzbor described and demonstrated the Magpie semantic web tool which will be deployed experimentally in S199, the Climate Science course written by Prof. Bob Spicer to accompany the ClimatePrediction.net experiment. Simon Buckingham Shum then described his work on scholarly publishing and debate, particularly ScholOnto and ClaiMaker.