Preparing Bilingual Metadata for a Bilingual Repository

The Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) is Ireland’s national trusted digital repository for the social and cultural, historical and contemporary data held by Irish institutions. DRI provides users with a bilingual (Irish and English) user interface at all user access levels, and provides innovative ways to process and display bilingual metadata. This article details our experience in enriching the bilingual metadata and developing the bilingual features of the repository. We present solutions to some of the linguistic and technical challenges we faced and provide recommendations to developers and archivists on how best to prepare bilingual content for contemporary archival repositories.     

Identifying HSS Research Data for Preservation: A Snapshot of Current Policy and Guidelines

This article discusses research data in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), and the extent to which Irish and international policy supports researchers in identifying and selecting their data for preservation. Researchers may experience difficulty in selecting and appraising their research data in a HSS context, where research is often qualitative and may include annotated draft texts, audio and video recordings, and images. Although international academic publications, practical manuals, and policy statements are available, it was found that, in general, guidance on identifying and selecting research data for preservation is not well developed in Ireland.     

Long-term digital preservation: preserving authenticity and usability of 3-D data

Long-term digital preservation, the process of maintaining digital objects through time to ensure continued access, has become a crucial issue in recent years. Whilst the amount of digitised information is constantly increasing, so too is the pace of progress in information technology, resulting in obsolescence of the software and hardware required to access and view digital information. Despite many organisations recognising this threat and the resulting need for preservation action, more work is required to effectively address the issue. We present in this article a framework for the long-term digital preservation of 3-D data. This framework is based on two pertinent preservation practices, emulation and metadata which ensure that the authenticity and usability, respectively, of a preserved digital object remain intact through time. An evaluation of our framework is presented which illustrates the viability of our approach in retaining accessibility, authenticity and usability for future end users.     

Preserving and ensuring long-term access to digitally born legal information

Written laws, records and legal materials form the very foundation of a democratic society. Lawmakers, legal scholars and everyday citizens alike need, and are entitled, to access the current and historic materials that comprise, explain, define, critique and contextualize their laws and legal institutions. The preservation of legal information in all formats is imperative. Thus far, the twenty-first century has witnessed unprecedented mass-scale acceptance and adoption of digital culture, which has resulted in an explosion in digital information. However, digitally born materials, especially those that are published directly and independently to the Web, are presently at an extremely high risk of permanent loss. Our legal heritage is no exception to this phenomenon, and efforts must be put forth to ensure that our current body of digital legal information is not lost. The authors explored the role of the United States law library community in the preservation of digital legal information. Through an online survey of state and academic law library directors, it was determined that those represented in the sample recognize that digitally born legal materials are at high risk for loss, yet their own digital preservation projects have primarily focused upon the preservation of digitized print materials, rather than digitally born materials. Digital preservation activities among surveyed libraries have been largely limited by a lack of funding, staffing and expertise; however, these barriers could be overcome by collaboration with other institutions, as well as participation in a large-scale regional or national digital preservation movement, which would allow for resource-sharing among participants. One such collaborative digital preservation program, the Chesapeake Project, is profiled in the article and explored as a collaborative effort that may be expanded upon or replicated by other institutions and libraries tackling the challenges of digital preservation.     

The Great Buddha Project: Digitally Archiving,Restoring, and Analyzing Cultural Heritage Objects

This paper presents an overview of our research project on digital preservation of cultural heritage objects and digital restoration of the original appearance of these objects. As an example of these objects, this project focuses on the preservation and restoration of the Great Buddhas. These are relatively large objects existing outdoors and providing various technical challenges. Geometric models of the great Buddhas are digitally achieved through a pipeline, consisting of acquiring data, aligning multiple range images, and merging these images. We have developed two alignment algorithms: a rapid simultaneous algorithm, based on graphics hardware, for quick data checking on site, and a parallel alignment algorithm, based on a PC cluster, for precise adjustment at the university. We have also designed a parallel voxel-based merging algorithm for connecting all aligned range images. On the geometric models created, we aligned texture images acquired from color cameras. We also developed two texture mapping methods. In an attempt to restore the original appearance of historical objects, we have synthesized several buildings and statues using scanned data and a literature survey with advice from experts.     

Trinity College Archives: A Digital Curation Challenge

The archives of Trinity College Dublin represent the corporate, administrative, and cultural memory of the university. This hybrid collection presents several challenges in relation to its management and long-term preservation. Appropriate storage conditions are vital for analogue records, as is the exercise over them of physical and intellectual control. However, born-digital archival records require the preservation of not only their data, but also evidence of their authenticity. For archivists, meeting these preservation challenges necessitates the integration of digital preservation strategies into traditional archival practices, advocacy of good records management, as well as close co-operation with legal and IT professionals.     

Future Proof: The Transition to Digital at IFI Archive

Informed by research over the past two years and the work of colleagues in peer institutions, the IFI Irish Film Archive developed a six-year Digital Preservation and Access strategy which launched in 2014. Fundamental to this Strategy was the design and installation of digital archive tools for long term preservation and the redesign of workflow practices to facilitate accession and management of high resolution digital film and broadcast assets and associated metadata. This article outlines the steps taken and standards applied in developing a future proof digital audiovisual archive.     

A Secure Grid Medical Data Manager Interfaced to the gLite Middleware

The medical community is producing and manipulating a tremendous volume of digital data for which computerized archiving, processing and analysis is needed. Grid infrastructures are promising for dealing with challenges arising in computerized medicine but the manipulation of medical data on such infrastructures faces both the problem of interconnecting medical information systems to Grid middlewares and of preserving patients’ privacy in a wide and distributed multi-user system. These constraints are often limiting the use of Grids for manipulating sensitive medical data. This paper describes our design of a medical data management system taking advantage of the advanced gLite data management services, developed in the context of the EGEE project, to fulfill the stringent needs of the medical community. It ensures medical data protection through strict data access control, anonymization and encryption. The multi-level access control provides the flexibility needed for implementing complex medical use-cases. Data anonymization prevents the exposure of most sensitive data to unauthorized users, and data encryption guarantees data protection even when it is stored at remote sites. Moreover, the developed prototype provides a Grid storage resource manager (SRM) interface to standard medical DICOM servers thereby enabling transparent access to medical data without interfering with medical practice.     

Querying on large and complex databases by content: Challenges on variety and veracity regarding real applications

The amount and variety of digital data currently being generated, stored and analyzed, including images, videos, and time series, have brought challenges to data administrators, analysts and developers, who struggle to comply with the expectations of both data owners and end users. The majority of the applications demand searching complex data by taking advantage of queries that analyze different aspects of the data, and need the answers in a timely manner. Content-based similarity retrieval techniques are well-suited to handle large databases, because they enable performing queries and analyses using features automatically extracted from the data, without users’ intervention. In this paper, we review and discuss the challenges posed to the database and related communities in order to provide techniques and tools that can meet the variety and veracity characteristics of big and complex data, while also considering the aspects of semantical preservation and completeness of the data. Examples and results obtained over a two-decade-long experience with real applications are presented and discussed.     

InfoMonitor: unobtrusively archiving a World Wide Web server

It is important to provide long-term preservation of digital data even when those data are stored in an unreliable system such as a filesystem, a legacy database, or even the World Wide Web. In this paper we focus on the problem of archiving the contents of a Web site without disrupting users who maintain the site. We propose an archival storage system, the InfoMonitor, in which a reliable archive is integrated with an unmodified existing store. Implementing such a system presents various challenges related to the mismatch of features between the components such as differences in naming and data manipulation operations. We examine each of these issues as well as solutions for the conflicts that arise. We also discuss our experience using the InfoMonitor to archive the Stanford Database Groups Web site.     

基于有损分解的数据隐私保护方法

隐私保护的数据挖掘近来已成为数据挖掘研究的热点,而数据隐私的保护则是其中的重要问题之一.针对已有方法信息损失程度高、聚集查询精度低的不足.在(alpha,k)隐私保护模型基础上,利用关系数据库理论的有损分解思想,提出了一种改进的数据隐私保护方法Alpha+.该方法首先利用(alpha.k)生成原始数据的匿名数据库,然后,将匿名数据库投影为2个可连接的数据库表NSS和SS,并利用NSS和SS有损连接的冗余信息保护数据隐私.接下来,Alpha+对NSS和SS的元组进行合并,以减少最终发布的数据库表大小.最后比较了Alpha+方法与其他类似方法的安全性.实验结果表明Alpha+在聚集查询精度方面明显优于同类方法.     

On the long-term retention of geometry-centric digital engineering artifacts

This paper discusses the challenges of long-term preservation of digital geometric models and the engineering processes associated with them. For engineering, design, manufacturing, and physics-based simulation data this requires formats that are accessible potentially indefinitely into the future. One of the fundamental challenges is the development of digital geometry-centric engineering representations that are self describing and assured to be interpretable over the long lifespans required by archival applications. Additionally, future users may have needs that require other information, going beyond geometry, be also accessible to fully interpret the model. These problems are highly interdisciplinary and not exclusively algorithmic or technical. To provide context, the paper introduces a case study illustrating an overall portrait of the problem. Based on observations from this case study, we present a framework for enhancing the preservation of geometry-centric engineering knowledge. This framework is currently being used on a number of projects in engineering education.     

Aeronautical communication transition from analog to digital data: A network security survey

The objective of this paper is to present a comprehensive survey of security challenges in aeronautical data communication networks. The civil aviation industry is currently going through an evolution of the air traffic management system. The aviation communication technologies are progressively shifting towards the use of digital data instead of analog voice for traffic control, airline business, and passenger onboard entertainment systems. This paper illustrates the cause-to-effect chain link starting from the modernization of the aeronautical communication systems and leading to the network security concern in the civil aviation. The general threats to air–ground communication are depicted and then categorized. The paper gives an overview of the civil aviation industry efforts for securing the future aeronautical data communications. The security mechanisms and protocols proposed for this purpose are discussed. Open research issues and challenges that have to be addressed in the security of current and future aeronautical data communication networks are presented in detail. The paper concludes with some improvement directions which can help to address those security issues. This survey can be used as a reference guide to first understand the factors that urge both the research community and the aviation industry to be concerned about network security in future aeronautical data communications. Also, it can be used as a first reading to have a global overview of network security issues, challenges and potential solutions in air–ground communication networks.     

Digitizing a Dictionary of Medieval Irish: the eDIL Project

The Centre for Irish and Celtic Studies at the University ofUlster is currently producing a digital dictionary of medievalIrish (eDIL) based on the standard Dictionary of the Irish Languagepublished by the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin. This paper addressessome of the problems encountered in the digitization process,including data capture, processing non-standard characters,modifications to the TEI guidelines, automatic generation oftags, and the establishment of a lexical view while preservingthe original format of the paper dictionary.     

云数据管理索引技术研究

数据的爆炸式增长给传统的关系型数据库带来了巨大的挑战,使其在扩展性、容错性等方面遇到了瓶颈.而云计算技术依靠其高扩展性、高可用性、容错性等特点,成为大规模数据管理的有效方案.然而现有的云数据管理系统也存在不足之处,其只能支持基于主键的快速查询,因缺乏索引、视图等机制,所以不能提供高效的多维查询、join等操作,这限制了云计算在很多方面的应用.主要对云数据管理中的索引技术的相关工作进行了深入调研,并作了对比分析,指出了其各自的优点和不足;对在云计算环境下针对海量物联网数据的多维索引技术研究工作进行了简单介绍;最后指出了在云计算环境下针对大数据索引技术的若干挑战性问题.     

RDF数据浏览的研究综述

随着语义网的快速发展,目前Web上语义网数据已经达到相当的规模,成为重要的信息和知识来源.因此,RDF数据浏览的研究开始得到广泛关注.通过对比传统Web信息浏览和RDF数据浏览两个问题,指出RDF数据浏览的5个重要问题:确定浏览子图的模式、数据的收集、大规模数据的处理、数据的组织方式以及数据的呈现方式.基于这些挑战,我们调研了多个系统和不同的解决方案.最后,总结了目前的研究现况,讨论存在的挑战,并提出未来的研究方向.     

Engineering Trans-oceanic 44 Mb/s TCP/IP networks

High-speed TCP/IP networks, capable of supporting several 10 Mb/s data streams, are in common use within the continental United States and are being introduced in Europe. Extending such networks to support the intercontinental research community will require the solving of several technical challenges, including those at the transport level and those in congestion control and buffering within packet/cell switches. An early trans-oceanic T3 network, the extension of the ANS T3 Network to Hawaii, is described, and the technical challenges are discussed in that context.