An integrated approach to preparing, publishing, presenting and preserving theses

[Abstract]: This paper describes progress on a project funded by the Australian government to create Free software; the Integrated Content Environment for research and scholarship (ICE-RS). ICE-RS is a multi-faceted project which will add value to finished theses by making them available in both HTML and PDF, as well as providing a mechanism for packaging multimedia theses. The project will also concentrate on providing services for thesis production, with version control, automated backup and collaboration services. The paper begins with the established content management system that is the basis for the project, ICE-RS , originally developed to create courseware packages. ICE includes distributed, version controlled collaboration, using word processing software and works on multiple platforms, with standard document formats. We survey other approaches to content authoring and publishing for ETDs. We showcase exploratory work on integration of the thesis writing process with Institutional Repository software including publishing theses in both PDF and HTML with preservation and descriptive metadata. The presentation will include demonstrations of thesis production at all stages of development from proposal to completion. In a more speculative vein, we will discuss opportunities for institutions to provide new levels of support for candidates via automated thesis “dashboard” progress reports, supervisor and examiner annotation and comment and support for copyright considerations as early as possible in the process

Generating collaborative systems for digital libraries: A model-driven approach

This is an open access article shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Copyright @ 2010 The Authors.The design and development of a digital library involves different stakeholders, such as: information architects, librarians, and domain experts, who need to agree on a common language to describe, discuss, and negotiate the services the library has to offer. To this end, high-level, language-neutral models have to be devised. Metamodeling techniques favor the definition of domainspecific visual languages through which stakeholders can share their views and directly manipulate representations of the domain entities. This paper describes CRADLE (Cooperative-Relational Approach to Digital Library Environments), a metamodel-based framework and visual language for the definition of notions and services related to the development of digital libraries. A collection of tools allows the automatic generation of several services, defined with the CRADLE visual language, and of the graphical user interfaces providing access to them for the final user. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated by presenting digital libraries generated with CRADLE, while the CRADLE environment has been evaluated by using the cognitive dimensions framework

Integration, management and communication of heterogeneous design resources with WWW technologies

Recently, advanced information technologies have opened new pos-sibilities for collaborative designs. In this paper, a Web-based collaborative de-sign environment is proposed, where heterogeneous design applications can be integrated with a common interface, managed dynamically for publishing and searching, and communicated with each other for integrated multi-objective de-sign. The CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) is employed as an implementation tool to enable integration and communication of design application programs; and the XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is used as a common data descriptive language for data exchange between heterogeneous applications and for resource description and recording. This paper also intro-duces the implementation of the system and the encapsulating issues of existing legacy applications. At last, an example of gear design based on the system is il-lustrated to identify the methods and procedure developed by this research

Universal Resource Lifecycle Management

This paper presents a model and a tool that allows Web users to define, execute, and manage lifecycles for any artifact available on the Web. In the paper we show the need for lifecycle management of Web artifacts, and we show in particular why it is important that non-programmers are also able to do this. We then discuss why current models do not allow this, and we present a model and a system implementation that achieves lifecycle management for any URI-identifiable and accessible object. The most challenging parts of the work lie in the definition of a simple but universal model and system (and in particular in allowing universality and simplicity to coexist) and in the ability to hide from the lifecycle modeler the complexity intrinsic in having to access and manage a variety of resources, which differ in nature, in the operations that are allowed on them, and in the protocols and data formats required to access them