Integration of Non-OAI Resources for Federated Searching in DLIST

Federated, distributed, and broadcast searches on the Internet depend on an underlying common metadata framework by which the information resources to be searched are organized. The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is designed to facilitate searches across OAI-compliant databases. Software such as Arc allow service providers to offer federated searching of multiple, OAI-compliant resources. The majority of web-accessible information resources, however, are not OAI-compliant. This article describes a process whereby readily available open source tools and customized scripts were developed for integrating metadata from non-OAI compliant repositories for a federated search. The work described is being carried out as part of the development of the Digital Library of Information Science and Technology (DLIST), an Eprints repository

Creating and customizing digital library collections with the Greenstone Librarian Interface

The Greenstone digital library software is a comprehensive system for building and distributing digital library collections. It provides a new way of organizing information and publishing it on the Internet. This paper describes how digital library collections can be created and customized with the new Greenstone Librarian Interface. Its basic features allow users to add documents and metadata to collections, create new collections whose structure mirrors existing ones, and build collections and put them in place so for users to view. More advanced users can design and customize new collection structures. At the most advanced level, the Librarian Interface gives expert users interactive access to the full power of Greenstone, which could formerly be tapped only by running Perl scripts manually

Social Bots for Online Public Health Interventions

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, in the United States hundreds of thousands initiate smoking each year, and millions live with smoking-related dis- eases. Many tobacco users discuss their habits and preferences on social media. This work conceptualizes a framework for targeted health interventions to inform tobacco users about the consequences of tobacco use. We designed a Twitter bot named Notobot (short for No-Tobacco Bot) that leverages machine learning to identify users posting pro-tobacco tweets and select individualized interventions to address their interest in tobacco use. We searched the Twitter feed for tobacco-related keywords and phrases, and trained a convolutional neural network using over 4,000 tweets dichotomously manually labeled as either pro- tobacco or not pro-tobacco. This model achieves a 90% recall rate on the training set and 74% on test data. Users posting pro- tobacco tweets are matched with former smokers with similar interests who posted anti-tobacco tweets. Algorithmic matching, based on the power of peer influence, allows for the systematic delivery of personalized interventions based on real anti-tobacco tweets from former smokers. Experimental evaluation suggests that our system would perform well if deployed. This research offers opportunities for public health researchers to increase health awareness at scale. Future work entails deploying the fully operational Notobot system in a controlled experiment within a public health campaign

Customized television: Standards compliant advanced digital television

This correspondence describes a European Union supported collaborative project called CustomTV based on the premise that future TV sets will provide all sorts of multimedia information and interactivity, as well as manage all such services according to each user’s or group of user’s preferences/profiles. We have demonstrated the potential of recent standards (MPEG-4 and MPEG-7) to implement such a scenario by building the following services: an advanced EPG, Weather Forecasting, and Stock Exchange/Flight Information

The Digital Puglia Project: An Active Digital Library of Remote Sensing Data

The growing need of software infrastructure able to create, maintain and ease the evolution of scientific data, promotes the development of digital libraries in order to provide the user with fast and reliable access to data. In a world that is rapidly changing, the standard view of a digital library as a data repository specialized to a community of users and provided with some search tools is no longer tenable. To be effective, a digital library should be an active digital library, meaning that users can process available data not just to retrieve a particular piece of information, but to infer new knowledge about the data at hand. Digital Puglia is a new project, conceived to emphasize not only retrieval of data to the client's workstation, but also customized processing of the data. Such processing tasks may include data mining, filtering and knowledge discovery in huge databases, compute-intensive image processing (such as principal component analysis, supervised classification, or pattern matching) and on demand computing sessions. We describe the issues, the requirements and the underlying technologies of the Digital Puglia Project, whose final goal is to build a high performance distributed and active digital library of remote sensing data

Enhanced Search for Educational Resources - A Perspective and a Prototype from ccLearn

Users of search tools who seek educational materials on the Internet are typically presented with either a web-scale search (e.g., Google or Yahoo) or a specialized, site-specific tool. The specialized search tools often rely upon custom data fields, such as user-entered ratings, to provide additional value. As currently designed, these systems are generally too labor intensive to manage and scale up beyond a single site or set of resources.However, custom (or structured) data of some form is necessary if search outcomes foreducational materials are to be improved. For example, design criteria and evaluative metrics are crucial attributes for educational resources, and these currently require human labeling and verification. Thus, one challenge is to design a search tool that capitalizes on available structured data (also called metadata) but is not crippled if the data are missing. This information should be amenable to repurposing by anyone, which means that it must be archived in a manner that can be discovered and leveraged easily.In this paper, we describe the extent to which DiscoverEd, a prototype developed by ccLearn, meets the design challenge of a scalable, enhanced search platform for educational resources. We then explore some of the key challenges regarding enhanced search for topic-specific Internet resources generally. We conclude by illustrating some possible future developments and third-party enhancements to the DiscoverEd prototype

Access in a Networked World: Scholars Portal in Context

published or submitted for publicatio

VisIVOWeb: A WWW Environment for Large-Scale Astrophysical Visualization

This article presents a newly developed Web portal called VisIVOWeb that aims to provide the astrophysical community with powerful visualization tools for large-scale data sets in the context of Web 2.0. VisIVOWeb can effectively handle modern numerical simulations and real-world observations. Our open-source software is based on established visualization toolkits offering high-quality rendering algorithms. The underlying data management is discussed with the supported visualization interfaces and movie-making functionality. We introduce VisIVOWeb Network, a robust network of customized Web portals for visual discovery, and VisIVOWeb Connect, a lightweight and efficient solution for seamlessly connecting to existing astrophysical archives. A significant effort has been devoted for ensuring interoperability with existing tools by adhering to IVOA standards. We conclude with a summary of our work and a discussion on future developments