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

The Semantic and Syntactic Model of Metadata

As more information becomes “born digital”, metadata creation is increasingly becoming part of the information creation process. Current metadata schemes inherit much of the library cataloging tradition, which has shown limitations on representing “born digital” type of resources. Through analysis of issues of metadata schemes and review of metadata research and projects, the authors propose an ontology-based approach to building a modular metadata model in which semantics and syntax may be integrated to suit the needs for representing “born digital” resources. The authors use an learning object ontology as an example to demonstrate how the semantics and syntax may be built into a modular model for metadata

The INCF Digital Atlasing Program: Report on Digital Atlasing Standards in the Rodent Brain

The goal of the INCF Digital Atlasing Program is to provide the vision and direction necessary to make the rapidly growing collection of multidimensional data of the rodent brain (images, gene expression, etc.) widely accessible and usable to the international research community. This Digital Brain Atlasing Standards Task Force was formed in May 2008 to investigate the state of rodent brain digital atlasing, and formulate standards, guidelines, and policy recommendations.

Our first objective has been the preparation of a detailed document that includes the vision and specific description of an infrastructure, systems and methods capable of serving the scientific goals of the community, as well as practical issues for achieving
the goals. This report builds on the 1st INCF Workshop on Mouse and Rat Brain Digital Atlasing Systems (Boline et al., 2007, _Nature Preceedings_, doi:10.1038/npre.2007.1046.1) and includes a more detailed analysis of both the current state and desired state of digital atlasing along with specific recommendations for achieving these goals

Preparing Laboratory and Real-World EEG Data for Large-Scale Analysis: A Containerized Approach.

Large-scale analysis of EEG and other physiological measures promises new insights into brain processes and more accurate and robust brain-computer interface models. However, the absence of standardized vocabularies for annotating events in a machine understandable manner, the welter of collection-specific data organizations, the difficulty in moving data across processing platforms, and the unavailability of agreed-upon standards for preprocessing have prevented large-scale analyses of EEG. Here we describe a "containerized" approach and freely available tools we have developed to facilitate the process of annotating, packaging, and preprocessing EEG data collections to enable data sharing, archiving, large-scale machine learning/data mining and (meta-)analysis. The EEG Study Schema (ESS) comprises three data "Levels," each with its own XML-document schema and file/folder convention, plus a standardized (PREP) pipeline to move raw (Data Level 1) data to a basic preprocessed state (Data Level 2) suitable for application of a large class of EEG analysis methods. Researchers can ship a study as a single unit and operate on its data using a standardized interface. ESS does not require a central database and provides all the metadata data necessary to execute a wide variety of EEG processing pipelines. The primary focus of ESS is automated in-depth analysis and meta-analysis EEG studies. However, ESS can also encapsulate meta-information for the other modalities such as eye tracking, that are increasingly used in both laboratory and real-world neuroimaging. ESS schema and tools are freely available at www.eegstudy.org and a central catalog of over 850 GB of existing data in ESS format is available at studycatalog.org. These tools and resources are part of a larger effort to enable data sharing at sufficient scale for researchers to engage in truly large-scale EEG analysis and data mining (BigEEG.org)

Digital Object Prototypes: An Effective Realization of Digital Object Types

Abstract. Digital Object Prototypes (DOPs) provide the DL designer with the ability to model diverse types of digital objects in a uniform manner while offering digital object type conformance; objects conform to the designer’s type definitions automatically. In this paper, we outline how DOPs effectively capture and express digital object typing infor-mation and finally assist in the development of unified web-based DL services such as adaptive cataloguing, batch digital object ingestion and automatic digital content conversions. In contrast, conventional DL ser-vices require custom implementations for each different type of material.

On the Effective Manipulation of Digital Objects: A Prototype-Based Instantiation Approach

Abstract. This paper elaborates on the design and development of an effective digital object manipulation mechanism that facilitates the gen-eration of configurable Digital Library application logic, as expressed by collection manager, cataloguing and browsing modules. Our work aims to resolve the issue that digital objects typing information can be cur-rently utilized only by humans as a guide and not by programs as a digital object type conformance mechanism. Drawing on the notions of the Object Oriented Model, we propose a “type checking ” mechanism that automates the conformance of digital objects to their type defini-tions, named digital object prototypes. We pinpoint the practical benefits gained by our approach in the development of the University of Athens Digital Library, in terms of code reuse and configuration capabilities.

Revisiting the city, augmented with digital technologies: The SeeARch tool

This paper presents a digital tool that enables the city inhabitants or visitors to acquire in real time, relevant information about several aspects of a given city, augmenting their real experience of the place. We used digital technologies, particularly an in-house developed Augmented Reality (AR) tool referred to as SeeARch,that augments in situ the city explo-ration experience. This tablet-based AR tool, enables mobile users to recognize the facade of specific buildings and, in real-time, superimpose relevant associated 3D and multimedia information, while visiting the city. The aim of this app is to provide customized infor-mation to visitors suiting their own interests and time to visit the city. User satisfaction evaluation tests were performed with a sample of the potential users. The outcomes of such user studies, showed that participants considered that our approach delivers a more detailed knowledge about the city, and is more informative, when compared with the nor-mal sight-seeing visits in the city, performed by the same participants.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Revisiting the city augmented by digital technologies – SeeARch tool

This paper presents a digital tool that enables the city inhabitants or visitors to acquire in real time, relevant information about several aspects of a given city, augmenting their real experience of the place. We used digital technologies, particularly an in-house developed Augmented Reality (AR) tool referred to as SeeARch,that augments in situ the city explo-ration experience. This tablet-based AR tool, enables mobile users to recognize the facade of specific buildings and, in real-time, superimpose relevant associated 3D and multimedia information, while visiting the city. The aim of this app is to provide customized infor-mation to visitors suiting their own interests and time to visit the city. User satisfaction evaluation tests were performed with a sample of the potential users. The outcomes of such user studies, showed that participants considered that our approach delivers a more detailed knowledge about the city, and is more informative, when compared with the nor-mal sight-seeing visits in the city, performed by the same participants.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio