Flexible and scalable digital library search

In this report the development of a specialised search engine for a digital library is described. The proposed system architecture consists of three levels: the conceptual, the logical and the physical level. The conceptual level schema enables by its exposure of a domain specific schema semantically rich conceptual search. The logical level provides a description language to achieve a high degree of flexibility for multimedia retrieval. The physical level takes care of scalable and efficient persistent data storage. The role, played by each level, changes during the various stages of a search engine's lifecycle: (1) modeling the index, (2) populating and maintaining the index and (3) querying the index. The integration of all this functionality allows the combination of both conceptual and content-based querying in the query stage. A search engine for the Australian Open tennis tournament website is used as a running example, which shows the power of the complete architecture and its various component

Open source in libraries: Implementation of an open source ILMS at Asia e-University library

Open source systems for libraries have improved significantly to gain the confidence of librarians. The main focus of the paper is to describe the selection process and criteria that led to the implementation of Koha the first open source Integrated Library Management System at the AeU Library. A study was made based on the set criteria used to compare and contrast with the more popular propriety library management systems. The paper presents the findings of the study which led to the selection of Koha, and a brief introduction to features of open source systems for libraries. The reasoning and conditions for accepting Koha are discussed. A brief account of the implementation process and related experience of the open source ILMS are given. AeU library implemented the various modules of the system: cataloging, online public access (OPAC), circulation, patron management and acquisitions. The expanding influence and acceptance of OSS in libraries is here to stay. Malaysian libraries may need to look into the credible options and benefits of utilizing open source systems and harness this development in ILS

Evolutionary Subject Tagging in the Humanities; Supporting Discovery and Examination in Digital Cultural Landscapes

In this paper, the authors attempt to identify problematic issues for subject tagging in the humanities, particularly those associated with information objects in digital formats. In the third major section, the authors identify a number of assumptions that lie behind the current practice of subject classification that we think should be challenged. We move then to propose features of classification systems that could increase their effectiveness. These emerged as recurrent themes in many of the conversations with scholars, consultants, and colleagues. Finally, we suggest next steps that we believe will help scholars and librarians develop better subject classification systems to support research in the humanities.NEH Office of Digital Humanities: Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant (HD-51166-10

Towards the cloudification of the social networks analytics

In the last years, with the increase of the available data from social networks and the rise of big data technologies, social data has emerged as one of the most profitable market for companies to increase their benefits. Besides, social computation scientists see such data as a vast ocean of information to study modern human societies. Nowadays, enterprises and researchers are developing their own mining tools in house, or they are outsourcing their social media mining needs to specialised companies with its consequent economical cost. In this paper, we present the first cloud computing service to facilitate the deployment of social media analytics applications to allow data practitioners to use social mining tools as a service. The main advantage of this service is the possibility to run different queries at the same time and combine their results in real time. Additionally, we also introduce twearch, a prototype to develop twitter mining algorithms as services in the cloud.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

A framework for P2P application development

Although Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing has become increasingly popular over recent years, there still exist only a very small number of application domains that have exploited it on a large scale. This can be attributed to a number of reasons including the rapid evolution of P2P technologies, coupled with their often-complex nature. This paper describes an implemented abstraction framework that seeks to aid developers in building P2P applications. A selection of example P2P applications that have been developed using this framework are also presented

The Almirall Project: a portal of 19 th century culture and thinking

The Ateneu Barcelonès is a civil, private cultural association that has been a part of Spanish society and culture since 1860, having been founded with the aim of promoting dialogue and disseminating knowledge about the country's artistic, historical and intellectual heritage. Since 2005, been taking part in various digitisation projects, including several digital projects. The Almirall Project aims to be a portal that explains, contextualises and inter-relates 19th-century works, thinkers, artists and schools of thought at Barcelona's Ateneu Library, providing access to digital copies lodged at other portals

Illinois Digital Scholarship: Preserving and Accessing the Digital Past, Present, and Future

Since the University's establishment in 1867, its scholarly output has been issued primarily in print, and the University Library and Archives have been readily able to collect, preserve, and to provide access to that output. Today, technological, economic, political and social forces are buffeting all means of scholarly communication. Scholars, academic institutions and publishers are engaged in debate about the impact of digital scholarship and open access publishing on the promotion and tenure process. The upsurge in digital scholarship affects many aspects of the academic enterprise, including how we record, evaluate, preserve, organize and disseminate scholarly work. The result has left the Library with no ready means by which to archive digitally produced publications, reports, presentations, and learning objects, much of which cannot be adequately represented in print form. In this incredibly fluid environment of digital scholarship, the critical question of how we will collect, preserve, and manage access to this important part of the University scholarly record demands a rational and forward-looking plan - one that includes perspectives from diverse scholarly disciplines, incorporates significant research breakthroughs in information science and computer science, and makes effective projections for future integration within the Library and computing services as a part of the campus infrastructure.Prepared jointly by the University of Illinois Library and CITES at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaig

Deep generative modeling for single-cell transcriptomics.

Single-cell transcriptome measurements can reveal unexplored biological diversity, but they suffer from technical noise and bias that must be modeled to account for the resulting uncertainty in downstream analyses. Here we introduce single-cell variational inference (scVI), a ready-to-use scalable framework for the probabilistic representation and analysis of gene expression in single cells ( https://github.com/YosefLab/scVI ). scVI uses stochastic optimization and deep neural networks to aggregate information across similar cells and genes and to approximate the distributions that underlie observed expression values, while accounting for batch effects and limited sensitivity. We used scVI for a range of fundamental analysis tasks including batch correction, visualization, clustering, and differential expression, and achieved high accuracy for each task