Interlinking related diverse media in a digital library

Digital libraries are widely used for organizing and presenting large collections of artifacts. However, as the digital libraries grow in size, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the user to find all the resources related to his topic of interest. It is labor intensive, time consuming and error prone to identify and link related materials manually. Thus it is important to develop automatic techniques to help the user discover and view the related resources that are available in the digital library. We have implemented an automatic interlinking mechanism for a music digital library system that spans across batch, online and on-demand phases. Since the task of generating the related links is resource and time intensive, distributing the whole process across these three phases significantly reduces the runtime overhead and improves the response time. This mechanism allows the system to display very large texts, with keywords identified and hyperlinked, with no perceivable delay to the user. Storing the artifacts in a structured manner and using the structural metadata to generate interlinkages allows us to create these links across diverse media like images, audio files, music scores, texts, etc. The implemented interlinking technique also scales well with a rapidly changing collection. The related links are displayed on demand, using AJAX technology. This allows the user to view these links without leaving the text, thus ensuring minimum disruption and continuity of action. We also have developed a generic interlinking framework which abstracts the domain independent logic for generating and displaying related links. This generic interlinking framework can be used by domain specific digital libraries to support interlinking of related resources

Feature identification framework and applications (FIFA)

Large digital libraries typically contain large collections of heterogeneous resources intended to be delivered to a variety of user communities. One key challenge for these libraries is providing tight integration between resources both within a single collection and across the several collections of the library with out requiring hand coding. One key tool in doing this is elucidating the internal structure of the digital resources and using that structure to form connections between the resources. The heterogeneous nature of the collections and the diversity of the needs in the user communities complicates this task. Accordingly, in this thesis, I describe an approach to implementing a feature identification system to support digital collections that provides a general framework for applications while allowing decisions about the details of document representation and features identification to be deferred to domain specific implementations of that framework. These deferred decisions include details of the semantics and syntax of markup, the types of metadata to be attached to documents, the types of features to be identified, the feature identification algorithms to be applied, and which features should be indexed. This approach results in strong support for the general aspects of developing a feature identification system allowing future work to focus on the details of applying that system to the specific needs of individual collections and user communities

Integrating Collections at the Cervantes Project

Unlike many efforts that focus on supporting scholarly research by developing large-scale, general resources for a wide range of audiences, we at the Cervantes Project have chosen to focus more narrowly on developing resources in support of ongoing research about the life and works of a single author, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616). This has lead to a group of hypertextual archives, tightly integrated around the narrative and thematic structure of Don Quixote. This project is typical of many humanities research efforts and we discuss how our experiences inform the broader challenge of developing resources to support humanities research