109 research outputs found

    BlogForever D3.2: Interoperability Prospects

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    This report evaluates the interoperability prospects of the BlogForever platform. Therefore, existing interoperability models are reviewed, a Delphi study to identify crucial aspects for the interoperability of web archives and digital libraries is conducted, technical interoperability standards and protocols are reviewed regarding their relevance for BlogForever, a simple approach to consider interoperability in specific usage scenarios is proposed, and a tangible approach to develop a succession plan that would allow a reliable transfer of content from the current digital archive to other digital repositories is presented

    Report of the Stanford Linked Data Workshop

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    The Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (SULAIR) with the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) conducted at week-long workshop on the prospects for a large scale, multi-national, multi-institutional prototype of a Linked Data environment for discovery of and navigation among the rapidly, chaotically expanding array of academic information resources. As preparation for the workshop, CLIR sponsored a survey by Jerry Persons, Chief Information Architect emeritus of SULAIR that was published originally for workshop participants as background to the workshop and is now publicly available. The original intention of the workshop was to devise a plan for such a prototype. However, such was the diversity of knowledge, experience, and views of the potential of Linked Data approaches that the workshop participants turned to two more fundamental goals: building common understanding and enthusiasm on the one hand and identifying opportunities and challenges to be confronted in the preparation of the intended prototype and its operation on the other. In pursuit of those objectives, the workshop participants produced:1. a value statement addressing the question of why a Linked Data approach is worth prototyping;2. a manifesto for Linked Libraries (and Museums and Archives and …);3. an outline of the phases in a life cycle of Linked Data approaches;4. a prioritized list of known issues in generating, harvesting & using Linked Data;5. a workflow with notes for converting library bibliographic records and other academic metadata to URIs;6. examples of potential “killer apps” using Linked Data: and7. a list of next steps and potential projects.This report includes a summary of the workshop agenda, a chart showing the use of Linked Data in cultural heritage venues, and short biographies and statements from each of the participants

    A Survey of Digital Library Aggregation Services

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    This report provides an overview of a diverse set of more than thirty digital library aggregation services, organizes them into functional clusters, and then evaluates them more fully from the perspective of an informed user. Most of the services under review rely wholly or partially on the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), although some of them predate its inception and a few use predominantly Z39.50 protocols. In the opening section of this report, each service is annotated with its organizational affiliation, subject coverage, function, audience, status, and size. Critical issues surrounding each of these elements are presented in order to provide the reader with an appreciation of the nuances inherent in seemingly straightforward factual information, such as audience or size. Each service is then grouped into one of five functional clusters: • open access e-print archives and servers; • cross-archive search services and aggregators; • from digital collections to digital library environments; • from peer-reviewed referratories to portal services; • specialized search engines

    Resource discovery in heterogeneous digital content environments

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    The concept of 'resource discovery' is central to our understanding of how users explore, navigate, locate and retrieve information resources. This submission for a PhD by Published Works examines a series of 11 related works which explore topics pertaining to resource discovery, each demonstrating heterogeneity in their digital discovery context. The assembled works are prefaced by nine chapters which seek to review and critically analyse the contribution of each work, as well as provide contextualization within the wider body of research literature. A series of conceptual sub-themes is used to organize and structure the works and the accompanying critical commentary. The thesis first begins by examining issues in distributed discovery contexts by studying collection level metadata (CLM), its application in 'information landscaping' techniques, and its relationship to the efficacy of federated item-level search tools. This research narrative continues but expands in the later works and commentary to consider the application of Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS), particularly within Semantic Web and machine interface contexts, with investigations of semantically aware terminology services in distributed discovery. The necessary modelling of data structures to support resource discovery - and its associated functionalities within digital libraries and repositories - is then considered within the novel context of technology-supported curriculum design repositories, where questions of human-computer interaction (HCI) are also examined. The final works studied as part of the thesis are those which investigate and evaluate the efficacy of open repositories in exposing knowledge commons to resource discovery via web search agents. Through the analysis of the collected works it is possible to identify a unifying theory of resource discovery, with the proposed concept of (meta)data alignment described and presented with a visual model. This analysis assists in the identification of a number of research topics worthy of further research; but it also highlights an incremental transition by the present author, from using research to inform the development of technologies designed to support or facilitate resource discovery, particularly at a 'meta' level, to the application of specific technologies to address resource discovery issues in a local context. Despite this variation the research narrative has remained focussed on topics surrounding resource discovery in heterogeneous digital content environments and is noted as having generated a coherent body of work. Separate chapters are used to consider the methodological approaches adopted in each work and the contribution made to research knowledge and professional practice.The concept of 'resource discovery' is central to our understanding of how users explore, navigate, locate and retrieve information resources. This submission for a PhD by Published Works examines a series of 11 related works which explore topics pertaining to resource discovery, each demonstrating heterogeneity in their digital discovery context. The assembled works are prefaced by nine chapters which seek to review and critically analyse the contribution of each work, as well as provide contextualization within the wider body of research literature. A series of conceptual sub-themes is used to organize and structure the works and the accompanying critical commentary. The thesis first begins by examining issues in distributed discovery contexts by studying collection level metadata (CLM), its application in 'information landscaping' techniques, and its relationship to the efficacy of federated item-level search tools. This research narrative continues but expands in the later works and commentary to consider the application of Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS), particularly within Semantic Web and machine interface contexts, with investigations of semantically aware terminology services in distributed discovery. The necessary modelling of data structures to support resource discovery - and its associated functionalities within digital libraries and repositories - is then considered within the novel context of technology-supported curriculum design repositories, where questions of human-computer interaction (HCI) are also examined. The final works studied as part of the thesis are those which investigate and evaluate the efficacy of open repositories in exposing knowledge commons to resource discovery via web search agents. Through the analysis of the collected works it is possible to identify a unifying theory of resource discovery, with the proposed concept of (meta)data alignment described and presented with a visual model. This analysis assists in the identification of a number of research topics worthy of further research; but it also highlights an incremental transition by the present author, from using research to inform the development of technologies designed to support or facilitate resource discovery, particularly at a 'meta' level, to the application of specific technologies to address resource discovery issues in a local context. Despite this variation the research narrative has remained focussed on topics surrounding resource discovery in heterogeneous digital content environments and is noted as having generated a coherent body of work. Separate chapters are used to consider the methodological approaches adopted in each work and the contribution made to research knowledge and professional practice

    Union Catalogs at the Crossroad

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    The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Library of Estonia organized a Conference on Union Catalogs which took place in Tallinn, in the National Library of Estonia on October 17-19, 2002. The Conference presented and discussed analytical papers dealing with various aspects of designing and implementing union catalogs and shared cataloging systems as revealed through the experiences of Eastern European, Baltic and South African research libraries. Here you can find the texts of the conference papers and the list of contributors and participants

    Fire-Robust Structural Engineering: A Framework Approach to Structural Design for Fire Conditions

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    Thanks to significant worldwide research directed at understanding and predicting structural behavior at elevated temperatures, analytical methods are available to support a rational, performance-based approach to the structural design of buildings for fire conditions. To utilize these analytical methods effectively, structural engineers need guidance on reliable and appropriate approaches to dealing with a variety of factors, including the effects of fire protection measures, temperature-dependent thermal and structural properties, elastic and inelastic behavior of structural components and assemblies, and thermal and structural response of framing connections. To meet the objective of guiding the structural engineer in appropriate analytical methods and parameter values for performance-based structural fire protection, this thesis proposes a comprehensive way of thinking about the design and analysis of structures for fire conditions. This integration of structural engineering and fire protection engineering into a functional framework is defined herein as Fire-Robust Structural Engineering (FRSE). The FRSE process, which is presented as a series of flowcharts, is designed to guide the structural engineer in executing the functions involved in the design of fire-safe structures and to help identify informational needs critical to these tasks. Currently, mechanisms for identifying possible resources to fulfill fire-related informational needs are generally organized for the convenience of the fire research community. Identification of resources that provide appropriate information for fire-robust structural engineering, such as laboratory fire test results, parametric studies of analytical methods, and other sources of guidance, is often difficult because these resources are rarely organized and presented for the benefit of structural engineers. To begin to resolve this problem, this thesis has developed a prototype information management system (IMS) based on the framework of the FRSE process. The IMS addresses the critical challenge of organizing and presenting the available knowledge and data in a format that is consistent with the perspective and informational needs of the structural engineer. The prototype version of the IMS has been implemented using a Microsoft Excel® platform. In addition to guidance in utilizing specific analytical methods and choosing appropriate parameter values, the structural engineer also requires an understanding of the input requirements and accuracy of various analytical methods in order to make informed decisions regarding which methods are appropriate for use with different structural configurations. Therefore, this thesis includes a model study as an example of a resource that could aid the structural engineer in making such decisions. The model study compares various analytical methods (simplified spreadsheet applications and advanced finite element techniques) to published laboratory test data and discusses concerns that the structural engineer must keep in mind when using each method. Conclusions are drawn regarding the appropriateness of each analytical method to the analysis of a fully restrained, spray-protected steel beam. Given this type of information, the structural engineer can make decisions regarding the types of analytical methods and the level of analytical sophistication required to solve a given design problem

    Integration of Wikipedia and a Geography Digital Library

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    In this paper, we address the problem of integrating Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, and G-Portal, a web-based digital library, in the geography domain. The integration facilitates the sharing of data and services between the two web applications that are of great value in learning. We first present an overall system architecture for supporting such an integration and address the metadata extraction problem associated with it. In metadata extraction, we focus on extracting and constructing metadata for geo-political regions namely cities and countries. Some empirical performance results will be presented. The paper will also describe the adaptations of G-Portal and Wikipedia to meet the integration requirements.Accepted versio

    Literary texts in an electronic age: Scholarly implications and library services [papers presented at the 1994 Clinic on Library applications of Data Processing, April 10-12, 1994]

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    Authors and readers in an age of electronic texts / Jay David Bolter -- Electronic texts in the humanities : a coming of age / Susan Hockey -- The Text Encoding Initiative : electronic text markup for research / C.M. Sperberg-McQueen -- Electronic texts and multimedia in the academic library : a view from the front line / Anita K. Lowry -- Humanizing information technology : cultural evolution and the institutionalization of electronic text processing / Mark Tyler Day -- Cohabiting with copyright on the nets / Mary Brandt Jensen -- The role of the scholarly publisher in an electronic environment / Lorrie LeJeune -- The feasibility of wide-area textual analysis systems in libraries : a practical analysis / John Price-Wilkin -- The scholar and his library in the computer age / James W. Marchand -- The challenges of electronic texts in the library : bibliographic control and access / Rebecca S. Guenther -- Durkheim???s imperative : the role of humanities faculty in the information technologies revolution / Robert Alun Jones -- The materiality of the book : another turn of the screw / Terry Belanger.published or submitted for publicatio

    From Here to Eternity: An Experiment Applying the e-Framework Infrastructure for Education and Research and the SUMO Ontology to Standards-based Geospatial Web Services

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    A number of efforts have been made in recent years to define standards for the description of resources (including web services) in services oriented architectures. These standards often use description logic ontologies (for example, OWL-S) and are intended to be machine-readable. They have been applied to geospatial web services to describe the functions that those services perform in a way that can be automatically interpreted by systems. By contrast, little effort has gone into the development of human readable descriptions of resources in a services oriented architecture, other than using unstructured natural language. e-Framework is an infrastructure for the higher education environment that provides a typology of human-readable artefacts that can be used to describe resources, and provides an internal structure for those artefacts. e-Framework has thus far not been used with geospatial information even though geospatial information has a number of important roles in education and research, and has a well-organised community of users and creators. This paper applies the e-Framework infrastructure to OGC web services, and also recommends the refinement of e-Framework with the use of the SUMO Upper Level Ontology to define Service Genres, the most abstract level of artefacts in e-Framework. It then illustrates the ways in which the Open Geospatial Consortium standards and specifications may be described in e-Framework. The work evaluates SUMO for e-Framework purposes, finding that its use for Service Genres is possible and offers a number of gains. It also evaluates e-Framework from a geospatial perspective, and shows that e-Framework’s constraints on resource descriptions do not suit the large and complex nature of geospatial web services
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