Search

Efficient and effective routing of content-based queries is an emerging problem in peer-to-peer networks, and can be seen as an extension of the traditional "resource selection" problem. The decision-theoretic framework for resource selection aims, in contrast to other approaches, at minimising overall costs including e.g. monetary costs, time and retrieval quality. A variant of this framework has been successfully applied to hierarchical peer-to-peer networks (where peers are partitioned into DL peers and hubs), but that approach considers retrieval quality only. This paper proposes a new model which is capable of considering also the time costs of hubs (i.e., the number of hops in subsequent steps). The evaluation on a large test-bed shows that this approach dramatically reduces the overall retrieval costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This poster presents plans for designing and developing learning support systems for end-users involved in the construction of a Language Learning Digital Library (LLDL). This is in conjunction with the LLDL project for developing stimulating interactive educational tasks that can be built on top of digital libraries made in Greenstone's open source software specifically to support language teaching and learning. The relevance of the proposed work includes the development of training modules and in-depth workshops for language teachers and students involved in the participatory design of stimulating educational activities that can be uploaded to create digital library collections. Digital libraries can support language teaching and learning through the use of authentic media, comprehensive searching capabilities, and automatically generated precision-targeted exercise material. They also provide social computing environments for teacher-to-student and peer-to-peer communications, along with opportunities to collaborate on group projects. What is more, teachers can build their own digital resource collections and these can be shared among online teaching communities which include annotations and reflections on how to best integrate the digital library technology into their teaching practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As information becomes available in increasing amounts, and to growing numbers of users, the shift towards a more user-centered, or personalized access to information becomes crucial. In this paper we consider the semantics and pragmatics of preference queries over tables containing information objects described through a set of attributes. In particular, we address two basic issues: how to define a preference query and its answer (semantics)how to evaluate a preference query (pragmatics) The main contributions of this paper are (a) the proposal of an expressive language for declaring qualitative preferences, (b) a novel approach to evaluating a preference query (c) the design of a user friendly interface with preference queries. Although our main motivation originates in digital libraries, our proposal is quite general and can be used in several application contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

DIGMAP is a project that will develop solutions for georeferenced digital libraries, especially focused on historical materials and in the promoting of our cultural and scientific heritage. The final results of the project will consist in a set of services available in the Internet, and in reusable open-source software solutions. The main service will be a specialized digital library, reusing metadata from European national libraries, to provide discovery and access to contents. Relevant metadata from third party sources will be also reused, as also descriptions and references to any other relevant external resource. The initiative will make a proof of concept reusing and enriching the contents from several European national libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider search engines and collaborative tagging systems from the perspective of resource discovery and re-finding on the Web. We performed repeated searches over nine-months on Google and del.icio.us for web pages related to three topics selected to have different dynamic characteristics. The results show differences in the resources they provide to the searcher. The resources tagged on del.icio.us differ strongly from the top results returned by Google. The results also suggest the changes in the most recently tagged web pages may be associated with the level of activity in user communities and, indirectly, with external events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The web is currently the information searching and browsing environment of choice for scholars and lay users alike. The goal of most cultural heritage applications is to interest a large audience, and therefore web interfaces are being developed even when part of their functionality is not offered to the general public. We present a web-based interface for managing, browsing and searching a repository of historic documents. The documents pertain to a region which has been an important regional power in medieval times and their originals are under the custody of the Portuguese national archives. The challenges of the project came from its requisites in three aspects: rigorous archival description, the incorporation of document analysis and a flexible search interface. The system is an instance of a multimedia database framework providing both browse and retrieval functionalities to end users and configuration and content management services to the collection administrators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process of development of metadata elements and structures can be approached and supported in a number of different ways. We sketch a user-centred approach to this process, based around an iterative development methodology, and briefly outline some major questions, challenges and benefits related to this approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this demonstration we will show how a metadata infrastructure comprised of gazetteers, biographical dictionaries, and a "Time Period Directory" can be dynamically exploited to help searchers navigate through multiple web-based resources, and displayed in context with related information about "Who?, What?, Where?, and When?" and providing dynamic searches of those external resources. The demostration will show both a web-based interface and a Google Earth-based geo-temporal browser. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital curation is about maintaining and adding value to a trusted body of digital information for current and future use. This requires active management and on-going appraisal over the entire life-cycle of scholarly and scientific materials. Whether there is a desire to make materials as open as possible or a requirement to keep them closed and private (for example in the case of sensitive personal data), legal elements can have a huge impact on the overall ability to effectively curate and preserve digital information over time. The DCC advocates the development of a framework for any curation activity that includes consideration of legal matters throughout. - from copyright and licensing models, to freedom of information and data protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are developing a Tsunami Digital Library (TDL) which can store and manage documents about tsunami, tsunami run up simulations, newspaper articles, fieldwork data, etc. In this paper, we propose a public education against the tsunami disaster mitigation as one of TDL applications. For the education, we use mobile phones to retrieve TDL because we have to walk coast regions. Then, we have prepared summaries of documents and newspaper articles in TDL, and also developed query systems for mobile phone retrievals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of newly generated multimedia documents (e.g. music, e-learning material, or 3D-graphics) increases year by year. Today, the workflow in digital libraries focuses on textual documents only. Hence, considering content-based retrieval tasks, multimedia documents are not analyzed and indexed sufficiently. To facilitate content-based retrieval and browsing, it is necessary to introduce recent techniques for multimedia document processing into the workflow of nowadays digital libraries. In this short paper, we introduce the PROBADO-framework which will (a) integrate different types of content-repositories - each one specialized for a specific multimedia domain - into one seamless system, and (b) will add features available in text-based digital libraries (such as automatic annotation, full-text retrieval, or recommender services) to non-textual documents. Existing libraries will benefit from the framework since it extends existing technology for handling textual documents with features for dealing with the non-textual domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Workshop on "The Future of Large-scale Evaluation Campaigns" was organised jointly by the University of Padua and the DELOS Network of Excellence and held in Padua, Italy, March 2007. The aim was to perform a critical assessment of the scientific results of such initiatives and to formulate recommendations for the future. This poster summarises the outcome of the discussion with respect to the major European activity in this area: the Cross Language Evaluation Forum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural heritage content is everywhere on the web, in contexts such as digital libraries, audiovisual archives, and portals of museums or galleries, in multiple languages and multiple media. MultiMatch, a 30 month specific targeted research project under the Sixth Framework Programme, plans to develop a multilingual search engine designed specifically for the access, organisation and personalised presentation of cultural heritage digital objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This demo shows a set of tools for managing and performing document transformations. These tools share a common infrastructure consisting on a set of Web Services and programming libraries to define semantic mappings and generate the corresponding transformation template automatically. The framework is currently being used on the Bibshare project to support the conversion between metadata formats, as well as in other domains related to Digital Libraries and Software Engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the development of a distributed annotation system which enables collaborative document consultation and creates new access to otherwise hard to index digital documents. It takes the annotations one step further: not only the same types of annotations are available across file formats, but robust references to the documents introduce format and location independence, and enable the attachment even when the document has been modified. These features are achieved using standards of the digital library systems, and don't require modification of the original documents or impose further restrictions, thus being infrastructure independent. Integration into the Kepler workflow system allows annotating workflow results, and the automatic creation and indexing of annotations in document oriented workflows, which can be used as a flexible way to archive and index collections in the Cheshire3 search engine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This poster reports on a study carried out to investigate and analyze a specific category of digital library visual interfaces that support information seeking, exploration and retrieval based on metadata representations, namely metadata-enhanced visual interfaces. This study has examined 21 metadata-enhanced digital library visual interfaces from the following perspectives: a) information access and retrieval features supported; b) metadata elements used; c) visualization techniques and metaphors utilized. The results show that visual interfaces to digital libraries enhanced with metadata are becoming more widespread. The study also demonstrates that the combined use of visualization techniques and metaphors is becoming increasingly prevalent as a design strategy to support users' information exploration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current digital libraries and online bibliographies share several properties with the Web and thus also share some of its problems. Faceted classifications and Semantic Web technologies are explored as possible approaches to improving digital libraries and alleviating their respective shortcomings. We describe the possibilities of using faceted navigation and its personalization in digital libraries. We propose a method of faceted browser adaptation based on an automatically acquired user model with support for dynamic facet generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present the results of a questionnaire survey for the access and reproduction policies of 67 digital collections in 34 libraries (national, academic, public, special etc) from 13 countries. We examine and analyze the above policies in relation to specific factors, such as, the acquisition method, copyright ownership, library type (national, academic, etc.), content creation (digitized, born-digital) and content type (audio, video, etc.); how these factors affect the policies of the examined digital collections. Responses were received from a range of library sectors but by far the best responses came from academic libraries, in which we focus. We extract policy (access, reproduction) rules and alternatives according to these factors that lead to a policy decision tree on digital information management for academic libraries. The resulting decision tree is based on a policy model; the model and tree are divided into two parts: for digitized and born-digital content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Self-Organising Map (SOM) has been proposed as an interface for exploring Digital Libraries, in addition to conventional search and browsing. With advanced visualisations uncovering the contents and its structure, and advanced interaction modes as zooming, panning and area selection, the SOM becomes a feasible alternative to classical interfaces. However, there are still shortcomings in helping the user to understand the map - there are insufficient methods developed for describing the map to support the user in the analysis of the map contents. In this paper, we present recent work in assisting the user in exploring the map by automatically describing maps using advanced labelling and summarisation of map regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work describes 5SQual, a quantitative quality assessment tool for digital libraries based on the 5S framework. 5SQual aims to help administrators of digital libraries during the implementation and maintenance phases of a digital library, providing ways to verify the quality of digital objects, metadata and services. The tool has been designed in a flexible way, which allows it to be applied to many systems, as long as the necessary data is available. To facilitate the input of these data, the tool provides a wizard-like interface that guides the user through its configuration process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optical music recognition (OMR) enables librarians to digitise early music sources on a large scale. The cost of expert human labour to correct automatic recognition errors dominates the cost of such projects. To reduce the number of recognition errors in the OMR process, we present an innovative approach to adapt the system dynamically, taking advantage of the human editing work that is part of any digitisation project. The corrected data are used to perform MAP adaptation, a machine-learning technique used previously in speech recognition and optical character recognition (OCR). Our experiments show that this technique can reduce editing costs by more than half. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The University of Trier maintains the DBLP (Digital Bibliography & Library Project) Computer Science Bibliography which offers bibliographic information about more than 870.000 scientific publications. This paper describes the DBLP WebCrawler, a meta search engine that is able to search for full text publications in PDF format for each DBLP entry on the web. Various search engines such as Google and Yahoo are used as data sources. The retrieved documents are additionally analysed and ranked according to their relevance. The proposed system differs from systems like CiteSeer in so far, that the DBLP Webcrawler builds upon metadata and tries to find relevant full-texts whereas CiteSeer mainly starts with full-texts and extracts metadata. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current research in large-scale information management systems is focused on unsupervised methods and techniques for information processing. Such approaches support scalability in regard to present-day exponential growth in information processing needs. In this paper we focus on the problem of automated quality evaluation of a completely unsupervised metadata extraction process in the Digital Libraries domain. In particular, we investigate resulting metadata quality applying specific extraction methodology for scientific documents. We propose and discuss precise quality metrics and measure the dynamics of such quality metrics as a function of the extracted information from the repository and size of the repository. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce a model of uncertainty where documents are not uniquely identified in a reference network, and some links may be incorrect. It generalizes the probabilistic approach on databases to graphs, and defines subgraphs with a probability distribution. The answer to a relational query is a distribution of documents, and we study how to approximate the ranking of the most likely documents and quantify the quality of the approximation. The answer to a function query is a distribution of values and we consider the size of the interval of Minimum and Maximum values as a measure for the precision of the answer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Service models for digital libraries have looked into how services may be decomposed into modules and components for greater flexiblity. These models are, however, mostly aimed at server-side applications. With the emergence of Ajax and similar techniques for processing XML documents within a Web browser, it has now become feasible for a browser to perform far more of the computational tasks traditionally encompassed in server-side DL services. Among other advantages, moving computation to the client can result in improved performance and scalability. As a new twist on service oriented computing, it is argued in this paper that digital library services can be provided partially or wholly through applications that execute client-side. Two case studies are provided to illustrate that such in-browser services are feasible and in fact more powerful and flexible than the traditional server-side service model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents, from e-book features, the concept of electronic work as a medium for publishing classic literature in different editions demanded by the Spanish educational system. The electronic work is an entity which, focused in its logical structure, provides a set of interaction services designed by means of Aqueducts, a processing model driven by XML data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increased usage of Web search engines in our daily lives means that the trustworthiness of searched results has become crucial. User studies on the usage of search engines and analysis of the factors used to determine trust that users have in search results are described in this paper. Based on the analysis, we developed a system to help users determine the trustworthiness of Web search results by computing and showing each returned page's topic majority, topic coverage, locality of supporting pages (i.e., pages linked to each search result) and other information. The measures proposed in the paper can be applied to the search of Web-based libraries or can be useful in the usage of digital library search systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution reports on the introduction of explicit recommender systems at the University Library of Karlsruhe. In March 2006, a rating service and a review service were added to the already existing behavior-based recommender system. Logged-in users can write reviews and rate all library documents (books, journals, multimedia, etc.); reading reviews and inspecting ratings are open to the general public. A role system is implemented that supports the submission of different reviews for the same document from one user to different user groups (students, scientists, etc.). Mechanism design problems like bias and free riding are discussed, to address these problems the introduction of incentive systems is described. Usage statistics are given and the question, which recommender system supports which user needs best, is covered. Summing up, recommender systems are a way to combine the support of library user interaction with information access beyond catalog searches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Document triage is the critical point in the information seeking process when the user first decides the relevance of a document to their information need. This complex process is not yet well understood, and subsequently we have undertaken a comparison of this task in both electronic and paper media. The results reveal that in each medium human judgement is influenced by different factors, and confirm some unproven hypotheses. How users claim they perform triage, and what they actually do, are often not the same. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Users' personal citation collections reflect users' interests and thus offer great potential for personalized digital services. We studied 18,120 citations in the personal collections of 96 users of RefWorks citation management system to understand these in terms of their resolvability i.e. how well these citations can be resolved to a unique identifier and to their online sources. While fewer than 4% of citations to articles in Journals and Conferences included a DOI, we were able to increase this resolvability to 50% by using a citation resolver. A much greater percentage of book citations included an ISBN (53%), but using an online resolver found ISBNs for an additional 20% of the book citations. Considering all citation types, we were able to resolve approximately 47% of all citations to either an online source or a unique identifier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital library systems are frequently defined with a focus on data collections, traditionally implemented as databases. However, when preservation and widespread access are most critical, some curators are considering how best to build digital library systems without databases. In many instances, XML-based formats are recommended because of many known advantages. This paper discusses the Bleek and Lloyd Collection, where such a solution was adopted. The Bleek and Lloyd Collection is a set of books and drawings that document the language and culture of some Bushman groups in Southern Africa, arguably one of the oldest yet most vulnerable and fragile cultures in the world. Databases were avoided because of the need for multi-OS support, long-term preservation and the use of large collections in remote locations with limited Internet access. While there are many advantages in using XML, scalability concerns are a limiting factor. This paper discusses how many of the scalability problems were overcome, resulting in a viable XML-centric solution for both greater preservation and access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For users to trust and interpret the data in scientific digital libraries, they must be able to assess the integrity of those data. Criteria for data integrity vary by context, by scientific problem, by individual, and a variety of other factors. This paper compares technical approaches to data integrity with scientific practices, as a case study in the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) in the use of wireless, in-situ sensing for the collection of large scientific data sets. The goal of this research is to identify functional requirements for digital libraries of scientific data that will serve to bridge the gap between current technical approaches to data integrity and existing scientific practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper represents a first attempt to formalize the get-specific document classification algorithm and to fully automate it through reasoning in a propositional concept language without requiring user involvement or a training dataset. We follow a knowledge-centric approach and convert a natural language hierarchical classification into a formal classification, where the labels are defined in the concept language. This allows us to encode the get-specific algorithm as a problem in the concept language. The reported experimental results provide evidence of practical applicability of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present an approach to question answering over heterogeneous knowledge sources that makes use of different ontology management components within the scenario of a digital library application. We present a principled framework for integrating structured metadata and unstructured resource content in a seamless manner which can then be flexibly queried using structured queries expressed in natural language. The novelty of the approach lies in the combination of different semantic technologies providing a clear benefit for the application scenario considered. The resulting system is implemented as part of the digital library of British Telecommunications (BT). The original contribution of our paper lies in the architecture we present allowing for the non-straightforward integration of the different components we consider. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we describe a system to perform Document Image Retrieval in Digital Libraries. The system allows users to retrieve digitized pages on the basis of layout similarities and to make textual searches on the documents without relying on OCR. The system is discussed in the context of recent applications of document image retrieval in the field of Digital Libraries. We present the different techniques in a single framework in which the emphasis is put on the representation level at which the similarity between the query and the indexed documents is computed. We also report the results of some recent experiments on the use of layout-based document image retrieval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digitized scientific documents should be marked up according to domain-specific XML schemas, to make maximum use of their content. Such markup allows for advanced, semantics-based access to the document collection. Many NLP applications have been developed to support automated annotation. But NLP results often are not accurate enough; and manual corrections are indispensable. We therefore have developed the GoldenGATE editor, a tool that integrates NLP applications and assistance features for manual XML editing. Plain XML editors do not feature such a tight integration: Users have to create the markup manually or move the documents back and forth between the editor and (mostly command line) NLP tools. This paper features the first empirical evaluation of how users benefit from such a tight integration when creating semantically rich digital libraries. We have conducted experiments with humans who had to perform markup tasks on a document collection from a generic domain. The results show clearly that markup editing assistance in tight combination with NLP functionality significantly reduces the user effort in annotating documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report on a study of the practices people employ to organize resources for their activities on their computers. Today the computer is the main working environment for many people. People use computers to do an increasing number of tasks. We observed different patterns of organization of resources across the desktop and the folder structure. We describe several strategies that people employ to customize the environment in order to easily perform their activities, access their resources, and overview their current tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The task of searching for documents is becoming more challenging as the volumes of data stored continues to increase, and retrieval systems produce longer results list. Graphical visualisations can assist users to more efficiently and effectively understand large volumes of information. This work investigates the use of multiple visualisations in a desktop search tool. These visualisations include a List View, Tree View, Map View, Bubble View, Tile View and Cloud View. A preliminary evaluation was undertaken by 94 participants to gauge its potential usefulness and to detect usability issues with its interface and graphical presentations. The evaluation results show that these visualisations made it easier and quicker for them to find relevant documents. All of the evaluators found at least one of the visualisations useful and over half of them found at least three of the visualisations to be useful. The evaluation results support the research premise that a combination of integrated visualisations will result in a more effective search tool. The next stage of work is to improve the current views in light of the evaluation findings in preparation for the scalability and longitudinal tests for a series of increasingly larger result sets of documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Annotations are an important part in today's digital libraries and Web information systems as an instrument for interactive knowledge creation. Annotation-based document retrieval aims at exploiting annotations as a rich source of evidence for document search. The POLAR framework supports annotation-based document search by translating POLAR programs into four-valued probabilistic datalog and applying a retrieval strategy called knowledge augmentation, where the content of a document is augmented with the content of its attached annotations. In order to evaluate this approach and POLAR's performance in document search, we set up a test collection based on a snapshot of ZDNet News, containing IT-related articles and attached discussion threads. Our evaluation shows that knowledge augmentation has the potential to increase retrieval effectiveness when applied in a moderate way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a unified extractive approach based on affinity graph to both generic and topic-focused multi-document summarizations. By using an asymmetric similarity measure, the relationships between sentences are reflected in a directed affinity graph for generic summarization. For topic-focused summarization, the topic information is incorporated into the affinity graph using a topic-sensitive affinity measure. Based on the affinity graph, the information richness of sentences is computed by the graph-ranking algorithm on differentiated intra-document links and inter-document links between sentences. Lastly, the greedy algorithm is employed to impose diversity penalty on sentences and the sentences with both high information richness and high information novelty are chosen into the summary. Experimental results on the tasks of DUC 2002-2005 demonstrate the excellent performances of the proposed approaches to both generic and topic-focused multi-document summarization tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The State and University Library of Denmark is developing an integrated search system called Summa, and as part of the Summa project a clustering module and a facet module. Simple clusters have been created for a collection of more than six and a half million library metadata records using a linear clustering algorithm. The created clusters are used to enrich the metadata records, and search results are presented to the user using a faceted browsing interface alongside a ranked result list. The most frequent tags in the different facets in the search result can be calculated and presented at a rate of approximately three million records per second per machine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Matching users' goals with available offers is a traditional research topic for electronic market places and service-oriented architectures. The new area of Semantic Web Services introduced the possibility of semantic matching between user goals and services. Authors show in the paper what kind of benefits semantic matching may provide for digital libraries. Various practical examples are given for the usefulness of semantic matching, and a novel algorithm is introduced for computing semantic matches. The implementation and operation of matching are explained using a digital document search scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about searching literature digital libraries to find "related" publications of a given publication. Existing approaches do not take into account publication topics in the relatedness computation, allowing topic diffusion across query output publications. In this paper, we propose a new way to measure "relatedness" by incorporating "contexts" (representing topics) of publications. We utilize existing ontology terms as contexts for publications, i.e., publications are assigned to their relevant contexts, where a context characterizes one or more publication topics. We define three ways of context-based relatedness, namely, (a) relatedness between two contexts (context-to-context relatedness) by using publications that are assigned to the contexts and the context structures in the context hierarchy, (b) relatedness between a context and a paper (paper-to-context relatedness), which is used to rank the relatedness of contexts with respect to a paper, and (c) relatedness between two papers (paper-to-paper relatedness) by using both paper-to-context and context-to-context relatedness measurements. Using existing biomedical ontology terms as contexts for genomics-oriented publications, our experiments indicate that the context-based approach is accurate, and solves the topic diffusion problem by effectively classifying and ranking related papers of a given paper based on the selected contexts of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Well-established instruments such as authority files and a growing set of data structures such as CIDOC CRM, FRBRoo, and MODS provide the foundation for emerging, new digital services. While solid, these instruments alone neither capture the essential data on which traditional scholarship depends nor enable the services which we can already identify as fundamental to any eResearch, cyberinfrastructure or virtual research environment for intellectual discourse. This paper describes a general model for primary sources, entities and thematic topics, the gap between this model and emerging infrastructure, and the tasks necessary to bridge it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose and evaluate a query expansion mechanism that supports searching and browsing in collections of annotated documents. Based on generative language models, our feedback mechanism uses document-level annotations to bias the generation of expansion terms and to generate browsing suggestions in the form of concepts selected from a controlled vocabulary (as typically used in digital library settings). We provide a detailed formalization of our feedback mechanism and evaluate its effectiveness using the TREC 2006 Genomics track test set. As to the retrieval effectiveness, we find a 20% improvement in mean average precision over a query-likelihood baseline, whilst increasing precision at 10. When we base the parameter estimation and feedback generation of our algorithm on a large corpus, we also find an improvement over state-of-the-art relevance models. The browsing suggestions are assessed along two dimensions: relevancy and specifity. We present an account of per-topic results, which helps understand for what type of queries our feedback mechanism is particularly helpful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the Internet, a large number of documents such as news articles and online journals are delivered everyday. We often have to review major topics and topic transitions from a large time-series of documents, but it requires much time and effort to browse and analyze the target documents. We have therefore developed an information visualization system called T-Scroll (Trend/Topic-Scroll) to visualize the transition of topics extracted from those documents. The system takes periodical outputs of the underlying clustering system for a time-series of documents then visualizes the relationships between clusters as a scroll. Using its interaction facility, users can grasp the topic transitions and the details of topics for the target time period. This paper describes the idea, the functions, the implementation, and the evaluation of the T-Scroll system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD) has developed a digital library for the long-term management of earth observation data products. This Product Library is a central part of DFD's multi-mission ground segment Data and Information Management System (DIMS) currently hosting one million digital products, corresponding to 150 Terabyte of data. Its data model is regularly extended to support products of upcoming earth observation missions. The ever increasing complexity led to the development of operating interfaces which use a-priori and context knowledge, allowing efficient management of the dynamic library content. This paper presents the development and operating of context-sensitive library access tools based on meta modeling and online grammar interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the general approach nestor - the German "Network of Expertise in Long-Term Storage of Digital Resources" has taken in designing a catalogue of criteria for trustworthy digital repositories for long-term preservation and how this approach relates to internationalisation and standardisation of criteria and developments of evaluation methods to facilitate the audit and certification process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Object transformation for preservation purposes is currently a hit-or-miss affair, where errors in transformation may go unnoticed for years since manual quality assurance is too resource-intensive for large collections of digital objects. We propose an approach of semi-automatic quality assurance (QA), where numerous separate automatic checks of "aspects" of the objects, combined with manual inspection, provides greater assurance that objects are transformed with little or no loss of quality. We present an example of using this approach to appraise the quality of OpenOffice's import of Word documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the main goals of the Nautical Archaeology Digital Library (NADL) is to assist nautical archaeologists in the reconstruction of ancient ships and the study of shipbuilding techniques. Ship reconstruction is a specialized task that requires supporting materials such as reference to fragments and timbers recovered from other excavations and consultation of shipbuilding treatises. The latter are manuscripts written in a variety of languages and spanning several centuries. Due to their diverse provenance, technical content, and time of writing, shipbuilding treatises are complex written sources. In this paper we discuss a digital library approach to handle these manuscripts and their multilingual properties (often including unknown terms and concepts), and how scholars in different countries are collaborating in this endeavor. Our collection of treatises raises interesting challenges and provides a glimpse of the relationship between texts and illustrations, and their mapping to physical objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]