From Classification to Indexing: How Automation Transforms the Way we Think

To classify is to organize the particulars in a body of information according to some meaningful scheme. Difficulty recognizing metaphor, synonyms and homonyms, and levels of generalization renders those applications of artificial intelligence that are currently in widespread use at a loss to deal effectively with classification. Indexing conveys nothing about relationships; it pinpoints information on particular topics without reference to anything else. Keyword searching is a form of indexing, and here artificial intelligence excels. Growing reliance on automated means of accessing information brings an increase in indexing and a corresponding decrease in classification. This brings about a shift from the modernist view of the world as permanently and hierarchically structured to the indeterminacy and contingency associated with postmodernism

Contexts and Contributions: Building the Distributed Library

This report updates and expands on A Survey of Digital Library Aggregation Services, originally commissioned by the DLF as an internal report in summer 2003, and released to the public later that year. It highlights major developments affecting the ecosystem of scholarly communications and digital libraries since the last survey and provides an analysis of OAI implementation demographics, based on a comparative review of repository registries and cross-archive search services. Secondly, it reviews the state-of-practice for a cohort of digital library aggregation services, grouping them in the context of the problem space to which they most closely adhere. Based in part on responses collected in fall 2005 from an online survey distributed to the original core services, the report investigates the purpose, function and challenges of next-generation aggregation services. On a case-by-case basis, the advances in each service are of interest in isolation from each other, but the report also attempts to situate these services in a larger context and to understand how they fit into a multi-dimensional and interdependent ecosystem supporting the worldwide community of scholars. Finally, the report summarizes the contributions of these services thus far and identifies obstacles requiring further attention to realize the goal of an open, distributed digital library system

VAS (Visual Analysis System): An information visualization engine to interpret World Wide Web structure

People increasingly encounter problems of interpreting and filtering mass quantities of information. The enormous growth of information systems on the World Wide Web has demonstrated that we need systems to filter, interpret, organize and present information in ways that allow users to use these large quantities of information. People need to be able to extract knowledge from this sometimes meaningful but sometimes useless mass of data in order to make informed decisions. Web users need to have some kind of information about the sort of page they might visit, such as, is it a rarely referenced or often-referenced page? This master\u27s thesis presents a method to address these problems using data mining and information visualization techniques