Italian center for Astronomical Archives publishing solution: modular and distributed

The Italian center for Astronomical Archives tries to provide astronomical data resources as interoperable services based on IVOA standards. Its VO expertise and knowledge comes from active participation within IVOA and VO at European and international level, with a double-fold goal: learn from the collaboration and provide inputs to the community. The first solution to build an easy to configure and maintain resource publisher conformant to VO standards proved to be too optimistic. For this reason it has been necessary to re-think the architecture with a modular system built around the messaging concept, where each modular component speaks to the other interested parties through a system of broker-managed queues. The first implemented protocol, the Simple Cone Search, shows the messaging task architecture connecting the parametric HTTP interface to the database backend access module, the logging module, and allows multiple cone search resources to be managed together through a configuration manager module. Even if relatively young, it already proved the flexibility required by the overall system when the database backend changed from MySQL to PostgreSQL+PgSphere. Another implementation test has been made to leverage task distribution over multiple servers to serve simultaneously: FITS cubes direct linking, cubes cutout and cubes positional merging. Currently the implementation of the SIA-2.0 standard protocol is ongoing while for TAP we will be adapting the TAPlib library. Alongside these tools a first administration tool (TASMAN) has been developed to ease the build up and maintenance of TAP_SCHEMA-ta including also ObsCore maintenance capability. Future work will be devoted at widening the range of VO protocols covered by the set of available modules, improve the configuration management and develop specific purpose modules common to all the service components.Comment: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2018, Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy V, pre-publishing draft proceeding (reduced abstract

Creating digital library collections with Greenstone

The Greenstone digital library software is a comprehensive system for building and distributing digital library collections. It provides a way of organizing information based on metadata and publishing ti on the Internet. This paper introduces Greenstone and explains how librarians use it to create and customize digital library collections. Through an end-user interface, they add documents and metadata to collections, create new collections whose structure mirrors existing ones, and build collections and put them in place for users to view. More advanced users can design and customize new collection structures

Digital libraries and minority languages

Digital libraries have a pivotal role to play in the preservation and maintenance of international cultures in general and minority languages in particular. This paper outlines a software tool for building digital libraries that is well adapted for creating and distributing local information collections in minority languages, and describes some contexts in which it is used. The system can make multilingual documents available in structured collections and allows them to be accessed via multilingual interfaces. It is issued under a free open-source licence, which encourages participatory design of the software, and an end-user interface allows community-based localization of the various language interfaces - of which there are many

Economics and Engineering for Preserving Digital Content

Progress towards practical long-term preservation seems to be stalled. Preservationists cannot afford specially developed technology, but must exploit what is created for the marketplace. Economic and technical facts suggest that most preservation ork should be shifted from repository institutions to information producers and consumers. Prior publications describe solutions for all known conceptual challenges of preserving a single digital object, but do not deal with software development or scaling to large collections. Much of the document handling software needed is available. It has, however, not yet been selected, adapted, integrated, or deployed for digital preservation. The daily tools of both information producers and information consumers can be extended to embed preservation packaging without much burdening these users. We describe a practical strategy for detailed design and implementation. Document handling is intrinsically complicated because of human sensitivity to communication nuances. Our engineering section therefore starts by discussing how project managers can master the many pertinent details.

Implementation and analysis of several keyframe-based browsing interfaces to digital video

In this paper we present a variety of browsing interfaces for digital video information. The six interfaces are implemented on top of Físchlár, an operational recording, indexing, browsing and playback system for broadcast TV programmes. In developing the six browsing interfaces, we have been informed by the various dimensions which can be used to distinguish one interface from another. For this we include layeredness (the number of “layers” of abstraction which can be used in browsing a programme), the provision or omission of temporal information (varying from full timestamp information to nothing at all on time) and visualisation of spatial vs. temporal aspects of the video. After introducing and defining these dimensions we then locate some common browsing interfaces from the literature in this 3-dimensional “space” and then we locate our own six interfaces in this same space. We then present an outline of the interfaces and include some user feedback

Agents for Distributed Multimedia Information Management

This paper discusses the role of agents in a distributed multimedia information system (DMIS) engineered according to the principles of open hypermedia. It is based on the new generation of Microcosm, an open hypermedia system developed by the Multimedia Research Group at the University of Southampton. Microcosm provides a framework for supporting the three major roles of agents within open information systems: resource discovery, information integrity and navigation assistance. We present Microcosm and its agents, and discuss our current research in applying agent technology in this framework

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

Customizing digital library interfaces with Greenstone

Digital libraries are organized, focused collections of information. They are focused on a particular topic or theme—and good digital libraries will articulate the principles governing what is included. They are organized to make information accessible in particular, well-defined, ways—and good ones will include a description of how the information is organized (Lesk, 1997). The Greenstone digital library software is intended to help users construct simple collections of information very quickly. Indeed, only a few minutes of the user's time are needed to set up a collection based on a standard design and initiate the building process. Collections may be large—some comprise Gbytes of text; millions of documents. Furthermore, even larger volumes of information may be associated with a collection—typically audio, image, and video, with textual metadata. Once initiated, the mechanical process of building the collection may take from a few moments for a tiny collection to several hours for a multi-Gbyte one—perhaps even a day if it involves many different full-text indexes

The demands of users and the publishing world: printed or online, free or paid for?

International audienc