ActiveGraph: A digital library visualization tool

ActiveGraph is an information visualization tool designed to provide users with a concise, customizable view of objects in a digital library. A set of digital library objects is represented as a data set in a two- or three-dimensional scatter plot. The data set can represent any digital library objects in any medium: books, journals, papers, images, Web resources, or even entire databases. Since ActiveGraph is intended for use in the context of digital libraries, data attributes consist for the most part of metadata fields such as title, author, date of publication, and number of citations. Data attributes are mapped to six visual attributes of the scatter plot: the X-, Y-, and Z-axes, color, size, and shape. The metadata for a selected data point are displayed in a control panel on the right-hand side of the screen. Users can edit the metadata and even add new metadata fields. Thus ActiveGraph allows users to both view and customize the contents of a library. Because of its flexibility in handling digital library objects and metadata of different types, ActiveGraph can be used in a variety of digital library applications. In this paper, we describe two: LibGraph, which is a visualization of a collaborative library, and CiteGraph, which is a visualization of citation statistics. Both applications were designed for use by scientists and engineers, for whom scatter plots are familiar and intuitive visualizations.     

Using distributed objects to build the Stanford digital libraryInfobus

For digital libraries to thrive, the providers of information processing services must be able to evolve their systems autonomously. However, as the complexity of their offerings increases, software tools more sophisticated than existing Web facilities are needed. Distributed object technology may be the answer. The availability of high-volume, increasingly sophisticated information is making the need for metadata facilities more urgent. Traditional, library-based approaches break down when used in an advanced digital library. More modular mechanisms are needed, and the CORBA system is one approach. Digital libraries are affected at a deep technical level by the widely differing user traditions of Web users and library patrons. The challenge and opportunity of digital libraries will be the synthesis of these traditions. The authors set out to create a technical infrastructure to support the construction of digital libraries. In their view, a digital library comprises widely distributed resources that can be maintained autonomously by different organizations and will not require adherence to uniform interfaces     

Shelves from bits [digital libraries]

Digital library is a broad term traditionally describing an online archive of documents. With the emergence of the Internet and Web, the concept of a digital library finally found its raison d'etre, and so today just about every academic institution and publisher on the planet is planning, or has implemented, some form of Web-based archive. The author looks at how the digital library concept today is useful not only to publishers but also for anyone wanting to create an online information archive     

高校数字图书馆元数据检索系统的设计与实现

结合承担某高校数字图书馆建设工程项目背景，详细分析了元数据的重要性和都柏林核心数据的特点，提出了高校数字图书馆信息检索系统总的设计思想和统一资源检索模型，最后设计出了数字资源的元数据结构和基于元数据的检索系统。     

Enhanced display of scientific articles using extended metadata

Although the Web has transformed science publishing, scientific papers themselves are still essentially “black boxes”, with much of their content intended for human readers only. Typically, computer-readable metadata associated with an article is limited to bibliographic details. By expanding article metadata to include taxonomic names, identifiers for cited material (e.g., publications, sequences, specimens, and other data), and geographical coordinates, publishers could greatly increase the scientific value of their digital content. At the same time this will provide novel ways for users to discover and navigate through this content, beyond the relatively limited linkage provided by bibliographic citation.As a proof of concept, my entry in the Elsevier Grand Challenge extracted extended metadata from a set of articles from the journal Molecular Phylogeny and Evolution and used it to populate an entity-attribute-value database. A simple web interface to this database enables an enhanced display of the content of an article, including a map of localities mentioned either explicitly or implicitly (through links to geotagged data), taxonomic coverage, and both data and citation links. Metadata extraction was limited to information listed in tables in the articles, such as GenBank sequences and specimen codes. The body of the article was not used, a restriction that was deliberate to demonstrate that making extended metadata available does not require a journal’s publisher to make the full-text freely available (although this is desirable for other reasons).     

Designing a Special Library's Intranet for an Engineering Audience

ABSTRACT

Designing a successful library Web site for an engineering audience means researching how engineers find and use information. It also requires the special librarian to conduct usability tests to determine what is and isn't working on the site. The special librarian is more than simply a librarian, he or she must be able to take the research and the test results and either build the Web site or make sure the site is built by a team. The librarian must be able to play several roles: researcher, tester, project leader, and Web manager. The more successful the librarian is at involving users in site design, the more used and usable the site will be. This article describes one librarian's experience with designing a special library Intranet. It also includes an extensive bibliography of related articles.     

Usability Testing of Academic Library Web Sites

ABSTRACT

This is a selective annotated bibliography of books, journal articles, and electronic resources relating to the usability assessment or testing of the academic library Web site. It focuses on the library Web site specifics, thus answering a librarian's need for one source of information on the available publications. All journal articles have been written by or for academic librarians. This bibliography embraces the issues of usability testing as a process, its goals, objectives, tools, and methodology. The bibliography is grouped by the following topics: background information, tools and methodologies, case studies, dedicated Web sites, and samples of presentations.     

Metadata Community Profiles for the Semantic Web

Metadata is needed to facilitate data sharing among geospatial information communities. Geographic Metadata Standards are available but tend to be general and complex in nature and also are not well suited to overcome semantic heterogeneities across vocabularies of different domains and user communities. Current formalizations of metadata standards are not flexible enough to allow reuse and extension of metadata specifications, in particular for Web based information systems. In order to address this problem we propose a methodology to create community specific metadata profiles for the Semantic Web by reusing metadata specifications and domain vocabularies encoded as resources for the Web. This ensures that these community profiles are semantically compatible so they can be used in Web based information systems. The ISO-19115:2003 geographic metadata standard is the most general standard available and is being used in conjunction with the Web Ontology Language as the expression medium to test the methodology for each one of the possible extensions documented in ISO-19115:2003. It is shown that it is possible to extend and reuse metadata specifications and vocabularies distributed in the Web using the Web Ontology Language, by utilizing the language's flexibility to create restrictions on inherit properties and to make interferences on web distributed resources. Examples from the area of Hydrology are provided to demonstrate the technical details of the approach.     

A methodological approach for designing and evaluating intelligent applications for digital collections

The rapid evolution of Internet services has led to a constantly increasing number of Web sites and to an increase in the available information. The main challenge is to support Web users in order to facilitate navigation through Web sites and to improve searching among the extremely large Web repository, such as digital libraries, online product catalogues, or other generic information sources. The complexity of today's services could be lowered by means of proactive support or advice from the system. The proactiveness could be achieved using dialoguing agents that exploit user profiles to provide personal recommendations. In this paper, we will present a general methodology to cover the entire process of designing advanced solutions for online services. The methodology has been adopted to elicit user requirements for the system developed in the COGITO project, and to evaluate the performance of the final prototype.     

A Review of “Reference Sources for Small and Medium-sized Libraries”

SUMMARY

In the summer of 1999, the libraries at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) embarked on a Web redesign project. Essential to the new Web site were the development of a database of resources, Sage, and the creation of various in-house tools, which are used to enter and edit database resources. Tools were also created which assist in the creation and maintenance of various Web sites. With the completion of the project, UCSD students, faculty and staff can easily locate the resources and library information they need and library staff have more tools for Web site management.     

xScraper:基于Web-Harvest技术批量与深度获取无结构化Web信息

通过分析Web-Harvest数据提取规则的设计原理,设计实现了一个xScraper系统。该系统的主要功能有: (1)定制设计满足不同需求的Web数据提取规则模板,驱动Web-Harvest内核进行无结构化信息提取;(2)批量可控 提取同一网址中的W cb信息(含图像);(3)跨网站深度提取主题相关信息;(4)提取Web信息元数据并将其转换为 XML标签;(5)实现无结构化多媒体信息的数据库管理。应用结果表明,系统提供了超出Web-Harvest的加值功能, 可满足不同的信息提取需求,其简单实用,便于扩展。     

SemWebDL: A privacy-preserving Semantic Web infrastructure for digital libraries

Recent advances in digital libraries have been closely intertwined with advances in Internet technologies. With the advent of the Web, digital libraries have been able to reach constituencies previously unanticipated. Because of the wide deployability of Web-accessible digital libraries, the potential for privacy violations has also grown tremendously. The much touted Semantic Web, with its agent, service, and ontology technologies, is slated to take the Web to another qualitative level in advances. Unfortunately, these advances may also open doors for privacy violations in ways never seen before. We propose a Semantic Web infrastructure, called SemWebDL, that enables the dynamic composition of disparate and autonomous digital libraries while preserving user privacy. In the proposed infrastructure, users will be able to pose more qualitative queries that may require the ad hoc collaboration of multiple digital libraries. In addition to the Semantic Web-based infrastructure, the quality of the response would rest on extraneous information in the form of a profile. We introduce the concept of communities to enable subject-based cooperation and search speedup. Further, digital libraries heterogeneity and autonomy are transcended by a layered Web-service-based infrastructure. Semantic Web-based digital library providers would advertise to Web services, which in turn are organized in communities accessed by users. For the purpose of privacy preservation, we devise a three-tier privacy model consisting of user privacy, Web service privacy, and digital library privacy that offers autonomy of perspectives for privacy definition and violation. We propose an approach that seamlessly interoperates with potentially conflicting privacy definitions and policies at the different levels of the Semantic Web-based infrastructure. A key aspect in the approach is the use of reputations for outsourcing Web services. A Web service reputation is associated with its behavior with regard to privacy preservation. We developed a technique that uses attribute ontologies and information flow difference to collect, evaluate, and disseminate the reputation of Web services.     

Automatic metadata mining from multilingual enterprise content

Personalization is increasingly vital especially for enterprises to be able to reach their customers. The key challenge in supporting personalization is the need for rich metadata, such as metadata about structural relationships, subject/concept relations between documents and cognitive metadata about documents (e.g. difficulty of a document). Manual annotation of large knowledge bases with such rich metadata is not scalable. As well as, automatic mining of cognitive metadata is challenging since it is very difficult to understand underlying intellectual knowledge about document automatically. On the other hand, the Web content is increasing becoming multilingual since growing amount of data generated on the Web is non-English. Current metadata extraction systems are generally based on English content and this requires to be revolutionized in order to adapt to the changing dynamics of the Web. To alleviate these problems, we introduce a novel automatic metadata extraction framework, which is based on a novel fuzzy based method for automatic cognitive metadata generation and uses different document parsing algorithms to extract rich metadata from multilingual enterprise content using the newly developed DocBook, Resource Type and Topic ontologies. Since the metadata generation process is based upon DocBook structured enterprise content, our framework is focused on enterprise documents and content which is loosely based on the DocBook type of formatting. DocBook is a common documentation formatting to formally produce corporate data and it is adopted by many enterprises. The proposed framework is illustrated and evaluated on English, German and French versions of the Symantec Norton 360 knowledge bases. The user study showed that the proposed fuzzy-based method generates reasonably accurate values with an average precision of 89.39% on the metadata values of document difficulty, document interactivity level and document interactivity type. The proposed fuzzy inference system achieves improved results compared to a rule-based reasoner for difficulty metadata extraction (∼11% enhancement). In addition, user perceived metadata quality scores (mean of 5.57 out of 6) found to be high and automated metadata analysis showed that the extracted metadata is high quality and can be suitable for personalized information retrieval.     

信息工程监理在高校数字图书馆中的应用

为了确保工程的质量、进度和服务,在高校数字图书馆工程中实施信息工程监理是必要的.结合承担某高校数字图书馆建设工程项目背景,研究了信息工程监理在高校数字图书馆系统的内容和特点.     

Practical maintenance of evolving metadata for digital preservation: algorithmic solution and system support

Metadata (i.e., data describing about data) of digital objects plays an important role in digital libraries and archives, and thus its quality needs to be maintained well. However, as digital objects evolve over time, their associated metadata evolves as well, causing a consistency issue. Since various functionalities of applications containing digital objects (e.g., digital library, public image repository) are based on metadata, evolving metadata directly affects the quality of such applications. To make matters worse, modern data applications are often large-scale (having millions of digital objects) and are constructed by software agents or crawlers (thus often having automatically populated and erroneous metadata). In such an environment, it is challenging to quickly and accurately identify evolving metadata and fix them (if needed) while applications keep running. Despite the importance and implications of the problem, the conventional solutions have been very limited. Most of existing metadata-related approaches either focus on the model and semantics of metadata, or simply keep authority file of some sort for evolving metadata, and never fully exploit its potential usage from the system point of view. On the other hand, the question that we raise in this paper is “when millions of digital objects and their metadata are given, (1) how to quickly identify evolving metadata in various context? and (2) once the evolving metadata are identified, how to incorporate them into the system?” The significance of this paper is that we investigate scalable algorithmic solution toward the identification of evolving metadata and emphasize the role of “systems” for maintenance, and argue that “systems” must keep track of metadata changes pro-actively, and leverage on the learned knowledge in their various services.     

空间信息数字图书馆元数据系统研究

本基于分布式GIS系统的技术体系，结合无数据技术，空间数据仓库技术，提出了可操作的空间数字图书馆元数据模型及数据管理模型。     

Web信息的结构化及其查询视图研究

Web并不是传统的关系数据库。在WWW浏览器上进行信息搜索时,常常难于快速有效地得到查询结果。就Web站点信息库的数据模型化、关系代数演算及关系视图的建立加以探讨,基于这一模式结构的Web站点信息查询便易于表达和实现。     

水利工程地理信息元数据的设计

通过对国内外著名的地理信息元数据标准的剖析,讨论了元数据的基本概念及元数据管理系统的开发和网络访问技术。在此基础上,结合水利工程地理信息元数据的特点实现了水利工程元数据标准、编写指南、关键词词典等功能,对元数据库建设具有有益的借鉴价值。