Little science confronts the data deluge: habitat ecology, embedded sensor networks, and digital libraries

e-Science promises to increase the pace of science via fast, distributed access to computational resources, analytical tools, and digital libraries. “Big science” fields such as physics and astronomy that collaborate around expensive instrumentation have constructed shared digital libraries to manage their data and documents, while “little science” research areas that gather data through hand-crafted fieldwork continue to manage their data locally. As habitat ecology researchers begin to deploy embedded sensor networks, they are confronting an array of challenges in capturing, organizing, and managing large amounts of data. The scientists and their partners in computer science and engineering make use of common datasets but interpret the data differently. Studies of this field in transition offer insights into the role of digital libraries in e-Science, how data practices evolve as science becomes more instrumented, and how scientists, computer scientists, and engineers collaborate around data. Among the lessons learned are that data on the same variables are gathered by multiple means, that data exist in many states and in many places, and that publication practices often drive data collection practices. Data sharing is embraced in principle but little sharing actually occurs, due to interrelated factors such as lack of demand, lack of standards, and concerns about publication, ownership, data quality, and ethics. We explore the implications of these findings for data policy and digital library architecture. Research reported here is affiliated with the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing.     

User interaction in digital libraries: coping with diversity through adaptation

User interface adaptations can be used to address several user interaction challenges in the development of digital library systems. This paper: (a) examines some of the intrinsic characteristics of digital library systems; (b) identifies some of the key Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) challenges in relation to design and architectural abstraction for user interfaces to digital library systems; and (c) develops an argumentation for adaptations in digital library systems. By drawing parallels to recent HCI research into adaptable and adaptive user interaction, the paper illustrates potential areas in which user interface adaptation can provide a useful technique for advancing the quality of human interaction with a digital library system. Received: 18 December 1998 / Revised: 31 May 1999     

Multidimensional ranking for data in digital spatial libraries

Digital spatial libraries currently under development are generating large repositories of data which will continue to grow. As these repositories grow, the situation will inevitably arise in which a digital library user may be confronted with several hundred spatial data sets in response to a particular query. The question then arises as to how the results from this search can be most easily assimilated by the user. Text based materials have benefited from substantial research and experience on ranking of search results. Ranking of spatial data sets has not received the same attention since there has been little motivation for such activity until recently. In this paper we propose a multidimensional ranking scheme based on the three dimensions of space, time, and theme. The multidimensional rank is presented graphically to inform users about how well data sets from a digital spatial library meet their spatial, temporal, and thematic targets.     

Reflections and looking ahead for CSCL: digital infrastructures,digital tools,and collaborative learning

International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning -     

Commercial digital image libraries,digital images and digital discontent

Publications such as consumer magazines rely heavily on image libraries as sources for the images they use in their issues. Traditionally, magazine editorial staff have discussed their image requirements over the telephone with library staff and the library has conducted the search. Many libraries have now developed Web sites and their customers search them for images themselves. A minority have e-commerce capabilities, and enable customers to purchase and download digital images from their sites. This survey found that magazine staff do not often choose to search digital libraries, preferring instead to continue to contact the library by telephone. Most also choose not to buy the use of digital images, but prefer to continue to work with conventional transparencies and slides. The reasons for these preferences, and the reasons they are unlikely to change in the short term, are explored.     

Knowledge discovery in digital libraries of electronic theses and dissertations: an NDLTD case study

Many scholarly writings today are available in electronic formats. With universities around the world choosing to make digital versions of their dissertations, theses, project reports, and related files and data sets available online, an overwhelming amount of information is becoming available on almost any particular topic. How will users decide which dissertation, or subsection of a dissertation, to read to get the required information on a particular topic? What kind of services can such digital libraries provide to make knowledge discovery easier? In this paper, we investigate these issues, using as a case study the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD), a rapidly growing collection that already has about 800,000 Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) from universities around the world. We propose the design for a scalable, Web Services based tool KDWebS (Knowledge Discovery System based on Web Services), to facilitate automated knowledge discovery in NDLTD. We also provide some preliminary proof of concept results to demonstrate the efficacy of the approach.     

Designing personalized digital libraries over websites with semistructured data

Issues concerning the design of personalized digital libraries over collections of semistructured data available on the Web are considered. The approach suggested makes it possible to design libraries adjusted to the personal needs of information users that place various requirements upon the contents and representation of information. The digital library is designed as a composition of fragments of websites. In this paper, a method for the compositional design of information systems is applied to semistructured data on the Web. This method was developed at the Institute for Problems of Informatics of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IPI RAS) [2]. The design procedure is demonstrated by designing a library over two websites containing data about registered patents.     

Video digital libraries: contributive and decentralised

Technology usage is changing rapidly and is becoming a more mobile, more social and more multimedia-based experience. This is especially true in the area of content creation where mobile social applications used by crowds of people are challenging traditional ways of creating and distributing content, especially for applications like news dissemination. Libraries have traditionally functioned as repositories where the information content of a society is analysed, curated, organised and stored, acting as a permanent record of what is to be remembered from a society. How can this function be achieved by present-day libraries attempting to cope with mobile, social, multimedia content who’s nature and utility of which change the type of information we wish to curate and store? This information is both dynamic and organic, posing challenges to the more fixed models of information in digital libraries. In this article we describe two digital library systems that archive video content from the sports domain, and which support user annotations and merging of diverse information sources in an integrated way. We report on analysis of the deployment of these two systems and highlight how they extend the traditional role of a (digital) library.     

The intensive use of digital data in modern natural science

Common approaches and technologies applied to digital data storage and processing in various disciplines are analyzed. It is shown that regardless of a specific subject area, working with large data set obtained as a result of experimenting or modeling requires similar methodological support, involving data curation, metadata support, and data genesis and quality annotation. The interdisciplinary field called “The properties of materials and substances” is analyzed as an example of a discipline that actively applies digital data. New approaches to the integration of data with heterogeneous properties that take into account structural data variations by the class of substances, the state of sample, experimental conditions, and other factors are investigated.     

Content-based retrieval in digital libraries

With the recent developments in multimedia and telecommunication technologies, content-based information is becoming increasingly important for various areas such as digital libraries, interactive video and multimedia publishing. Multimedia data refers to simple structured data (such as numbers and short strings), large unstructured data (such as text documents, images, audio and video data) and complex structured data (such as maps, graphs, charts and tables). In this article, we briefly address content-based retrieval and the issues of representation, storage and retrieval of multimedia objects in digital libraries. We then very briefly identify some open areas of research     

Real-Time digital libraries based on widely distributed, high performance management of large data objects

Received: 2 April 1997 / Revised: 30 June 1997 / Accepted: 5 August 1997     

Overcoming semantic heterogeneity in spatial data infrastructures

In current spatial data infrastructures (SDIs), it is still often difficult to effectively exchange or re-use geographic data sets. A main reason for this is semantic heterogeneity, which occurs at different levels: at the metadata, the schema and the data content level. It is the goal of the work presented in this paper to overcome the problems caused by semantic heterogeneity on all three levels. We present a method based on ontologies and logical reasoning, which enhances the discovery, retrieval, interpretation and integration of geographic data in SDIs. Its benefits and practical use are illustrated with examples from the domains of geology and hydrology.     

Personalisation and recommender systems in digital libraries

Widespread use of the Internet has resulted in digital libraries that are increasingly used by diverse communities of users for diverse purposes and in which sharing and collaboration have become important social elements. As such libraries become commonplace, as their contents and services become more varied, and as their patrons become more experienced with computer technology, users will expect more sophisticated services from these libraries. A simple search function, normally an integral part of any digital library, increasingly leads to user frustration as user needs become more complex and as the volume of managed information increases. Proactive digital libraries, where the library evolves from being passive and untailored, are seen as offering great potential for addressing and overcoming these issues and include techniques such as personalisation and recommender systems. In this paper, following on from the DELOS/NSF Working Group on Personalisation and Recommender Systems for Digital Libraries, which met and reported during 2003, we present some background material on the scope of personalisation and recommender systems in digital libraries. We then outline the working group’s vision for the evolution of digital libraries and the role that personalisation and recommender systems will play, and we present a series of research challenges and specific recommendations and research priorities for the field.     

Usability study of digital libraries: ACM, IEEE-CS, NCSTRL, NDLTD

If digital libraries are to be used effectively, their user interfaces should be tested and enhanced. We observed 48 participants as they worked with the following digital libraries: ACM, IEEE-CS, NCSTRL, and NDLTD. We discuss how the features of these digital libraries influence the subjects’ efforts to perform search and retrieval tasks. Data analysis indicates that the IEEE-CS digital library was rated the best overall and NDLTD had the best search time. We present user recommendations and propose a taxonomy of features that we believe are essential for the design of future digital libraries. Noteworthy is the observation that users’ judgements on the importance of different features varied widely between the beginning and end of their test sessions. Received: 15 December 1997 / Revised: June 1999     

BlobSeer: Next-generation data management for large scale infrastructures

As data volumes increase at a high speed in more and more application fields of science, engineering, information services, etc., the challenges posed by data-intensive computing gain increasing importance. The emergence of highly scalable infrastructures, e.g. for cloud computing and for petascale computing and beyond, introduces additional issues for which scalable data management becomes an immediate need. This paper makes several contributions. First, it proposes a set of principles for designing highly scalable distributed storage systems that are optimized for heavy data access concurrency. In particular, we highlight the potentially large benefits of using versioning in this context. Second, based on these principles, we propose a set of versioning algorithms, both for data and metadata, that enable a high throughput under concurrency. Finally, we implement and evaluate these algorithms in the BlobSeer prototype, that we integrate as a storage backend in the Hadoop MapReduce framework. We perform extensive microbenchmarks as well as experiments with real MapReduce applications: they demonstrate that applying the principles defended in our approach brings substantial benefits to data intensive applications.     

Rule-based query personalization in digital libraries

Searching a digital library is typically a tedious task. A system can improve information access by building on knowledge about a user acquired in a user profile in order to customize information access both in terms of the information returned in response to a query (query personalization) as well as in terms of the presentation of the results (presentation personalization). In this paper, we focus on query personalization in digital libraries; in particular, we address structured queries involving metadata stored in relational databases. We describe the specification of user preferences at the level of a user profile and the process of query personalization with the use of query-rewriting rules.