4,187 research outputs found
An Experimental Digital Library Platform - A Demonstrator Prototype for the DigLib Project at SICS
Within the framework of the Digital Library project at SICS, this thesis describes the implementation of a demonstrator prototype of a digital library (DigLib); an experimental platform integrating several functions in one common interface. It includes descriptions of the structure and formats of the digital library collection, the tailoring of the search engine Dienst, the construction of a keyword extraction tool, and the design and development of the interface. The platform was realised through sicsDAIS, an agent interaction and presentation system, and is to be used for testing and evaluating various tools for information seeking. The platform supports various user interaction strategies by providing: search in bibliographic records (Dienst); an index of keywords (the Keyword Extraction Function (KEF)); and browsing through the hierarchical structure of the collection. KEF was developed for this thesis work, and extracts and presents keywords from Swedish documents. Although based on a comparatively simple algorithm, KEF contributes by supplying a long-felt want in the area of Information Retrieval. Evaluations of the tasks and the interface still remain to be done, but the digital library is very much up and running. By implementing the platform through sicsDAIS, DigLib can deploy additional tools and search engines without interfering with already running modules. If wanted, agents providing other services than SICS can supply, can be plugged in
The NASA Astrophysics Data System: Architecture
The powerful discovery capabilities available in the ADS bibliographic
services are possible thanks to the design of a flexible search and retrieval
system based on a relational database model. Bibliographic records are stored
as a corpus of structured documents containing fielded data and metadata, while
discipline-specific knowledge is segregated in a set of files independent of
the bibliographic data itself.
The creation and management of links to both internal and external resources
associated with each bibliography in the database is made possible by
representing them as a set of document properties and their attributes.
To improve global access to the ADS data holdings, a number of mirror sites
have been created by cloning the database contents and software on a variety of
hardware and software platforms.
The procedures used to create and manage the database and its mirrors have
been written as a set of scripts that can be run in either an interactive or
unsupervised fashion.
The ADS can be accessed at http://adswww.harvard.eduComment: 25 pages, 8 figures, 3 table
An efficient early-pooling protocol for environmental DNA metabarcoding
Environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding, a method that applies high-throughput sequencing and universal primer sets to eDNA analysis, has been a promising approach for efficient, comprehensive biodiversity monitoring. However, significant money-, labor-, and time-costs are still required for performing eDNA metabarcoding. In this study, we assessed the performance of an “early-pooling” protocol (a protocol based on 1st PCR tagging) to reduce the experimental costs of library preparation for eDNA metabarcoding. Specifically, we performed three experiments to investigate the effects of 1st PCR-tagging and 2nd PCR-indexing protocols on the community composition revealed by eDNA metabarcoding, the effects of post-1st PCR exonuclease purification on tag jumping (corresponds to index hopping in 2nd PCR indexing), and the effects of the number of PCR replicates and the eDNA template volume on the number of detected OTUs. Analyses of 204 eDNA libraries from three natural aquatic ecosystems and one mock eDNA sample showed that (i) 1st PCR tagging does not cause clear biases in the outcomes of eDNA metabarcoding, (ii) post-1st PCR exonuclease purification reduces the risk of tag jumping, and (iii) increasing the eDNA template volume may increase the number of detected OTUs and reduce variations in the detected community compositions, similar to increasing the number of 1st PCR replicates. Our results show that an early-pooling protocol with post-1st PCR exonuclease purification and an increased amount of the DNA template reduces the risk of tag jumping, the costs for consumables and reagents (except for many tagged 1st PCR primers), and the handling time in library preparation, and produces similar results to a 2nd PCR-indexing protocol. Therefore, once a target metabarcoding region is selected and a set of tagged-1st PCR primers is prepared, the early-pooling protocol provides a cost, labor, and time-efficient approach for processing a large number of samples
The NASA Astrophysics Data System: The Search Engine and its User Interface
The ADS Abstract and Article Services provide access to the astronomical
literature through the World Wide Web (WWW). The forms based user interface
provides access to sophisticated searching capabilities that allow our users to
find references in the fields of Astronomy, Physics/Geophysics, and
astronomical Instrumentation and Engineering. The returned information includes
links to other on-line information sources, creating an extensive astronomical
digital library. Other interfaces to the ADS databases provide direct access to
the ADS data to allow developers of other data systems to integrate our data
into their system.
The search engine is a custom-built software system that is specifically
tailored to search astronomical references. It includes an extensive synonym
list that contains discipline specific knowledge about search term
equivalences.
Search request logs show the usage pattern of the various search system
capabilities. Access logs show the world-wide distribution of ADS users.
The ADS can be accessed at http://adswww.harvard.eduComment: 23 pages, 18 figures, 11 table
A framework for automatic semantic video annotation
The rapidly increasing quantity of publicly available videos has driven research into developing automatic tools for indexing, rating, searching and retrieval. Textual semantic representations, such as tagging, labelling and annotation, are often important factors in the process of indexing any video, because of their user-friendly way of representing the semantics appropriate for search and retrieval. Ideally, this annotation should be inspired by the human cognitive way of perceiving and of describing videos. The difference between the low-level visual contents and the corresponding human perception is referred to as the ‘semantic gap’. Tackling this gap is even harder in the case of unconstrained videos, mainly due to the lack of any previous information about the analyzed video on the one hand, and the huge amount of generic knowledge required on the other. This paper introduces a framework for the Automatic Semantic Annotation of unconstrained videos. The proposed framework utilizes two non-domain-specific layers: low-level visual similarity matching, and an annotation analysis that employs commonsense knowledgebases. Commonsense ontology is created by incorporating multiple-structured semantic relationships. Experiments and black-box tests are carried out on standard video databases for action recognition and video information retrieval. White-box tests examine the performance of the individual intermediate layers of the framework, and the evaluation of the results and the statistical analysis show that integrating visual similarity matching with commonsense semantic relationships provides an effective approach to automated video annotation
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