Representation and Encoding of Heterogeneous Data in a Web Based Research Environment for Manuscript and Textual Studies

This paper describes the general architecture of a digital research environment for manuscript and textual studies (particularly those pertaining to ancient Greek and Byzantine texts), and it discusses some questions of data representation and encoding in the framework of such an online research platform. The platform is being developed by the project Teuchos. Zentrum für Handschriften- und Textforschung, established in 2007 by the Institut für Griechische und Lateinische Philologie (Universität Hamburg) in cooperation with the Aristoteles-Archiv (Freie Universität Berlin). Teuchos is a long-term infrastructural project of the Universität Hamburg. It is currently in its three-year initial phase which is being co-funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) through the "Thematic Information Networks" scheme within the "Scientific Library Services and Information Systems" programme. We introduce the main object types to be handled by our system and describe the overall functionality of the online platform. The paper focuses on the representations of two main object types: manuscripts as textual witnesses and watermarks, with an emphasis on the former. Since the adequate encoding of different layers of structure of a transmitted text is particularly relevant to optimising users' choices of navigating both digital images of the containing manuscripts and trancriptions of the text contained, this topic is discussed in some detail. We introduce the formal data model and the corresponding encoding for the object types discussed. The project encodes textual data in XML, aiming for TEI conformance where possible. Since no accepted XML model exists for the encoding of metadata within a watermark collection, we briefly explain how we chose to model the objects to accomodate the collections the project is making accessible

Meeting of the MINDS: an information retrieval research agenda

Since its inception in the late 1950s, the field of Information Retrieval (IR) has developed tools that help people find, organize, and analyze information. The key early influences on the field are well-known. Among them are H. P. Luhn's pioneering work, the development of the vector space retrieval model by Salton and his students, Cleverdon's development of the Cranfield experimental methodology, Spärck Jones' development of idf, and a series of probabilistic retrieval models by Robertson and Croft. Until the development of the WorldWideWeb (Web), IR was of greatest interest to professional information analysts such as librarians, intelligence analysts, the legal community, and the pharmaceutical industry

SWI-Prolog and the Web

Where Prolog is commonly seen as a component in a Web application that is either embedded or communicates using a proprietary protocol, we propose an architecture where Prolog communicates to other components in a Web application using the standard HTTP protocol. By avoiding embedding in external Web servers development and deployment become much easier. To support this architecture, in addition to the transfer protocol, we must also support parsing, representing and generating the key Web document types such as HTML, XML and RDF. This paper motivates the design decisions in the libraries and extensions to Prolog for handling Web documents and protocols. The design has been guided by the requirement to handle large documents efficiently. The described libraries support a wide range of Web applications ranging from HTML and XML documents to Semantic Web RDF processing. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP)Comment: 31 pages, 24 figures and 2 tables. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP

DIGITAL TEHNOLOGIES. AN OVERVIEW OF CURRENT EVOLUTIONS AND IMPACT

Various observers describe today's global economy as one in transition to aknowledge economy, as an extension of an information society. The transition requires thatthe rules and practices that determined success in the industrial economy need rewriting in aninterconnected, globalized economy where knowledge resources such as know-how andexpertise are as critical as other economic resources. According to analysts of the knowledgeeconomy, these rules need to be rewritten at the levels of firms and industries in terms ofknowledge management and at the level of public policy as knowledge policy or knowledge-related policy. The digital and ICT revolutions are twin revolutions. Information andcommunications technology (ICT) refers to a broad field encompassing computers,communications equipment and the services associated with them. It includes the telephone,cellular networks, satellite communication, broadcasting media and other forms ofcommunication.digital revolutions, communication equipment, broadcasting media

Engineering polymer informatics: Towards the computer-aided design of polymers

The computer-aided design of polymers is one of the holy grails of modern chemical informatics and of significant interest for a number of communities in polymer science. The paper outlines a vision for the in silico design of polymers and presents an information model for polymers based on modern semantic web technologies, thus laying the foundations for achieving the vision

DRIVER Technology Watch Report

This report is part of the Discovery Workpackage (WP4) and is the third report out of four deliverables. The objective of this report is to give an overview of the latest technical developments in the world of digital repositories, digital libraries and beyond, in order to serve as theoretical and practical input for the technical DRIVER developments, especially those focused on enhanced publications. This report consists of two main parts, one part focuses on interoperability standards for enhanced publications, the other part consists of three subchapters, which give a landscape picture of current and surfacing technologies and communities crucial to DRIVER. These three subchapters contain the GRID, CRIS and LTP communities and technologies. Every chapter contains a theoretical explanation, followed by case studies and the outcomes and opportunities for DRIVER in this field

Library systems: the trends, the developments, the future

This article introduces some of the latest developments and trends taking place with respect to library systems, and makes some informed judgements on what the future holds

Experiences in teaching grid computing to advanced level students

The development of teaching materials for future software engineers is critical to the long term success of the grid. At present however there is considerable turmoil in the grid community both within the standards and the technology base underpinning these standards. In this context, it is especially challenging to develop teaching materials that have some sort of lifetime beyond the next wave of grid middleware and standards. In addition, the current way in which grid security is supported and delivered has two key problems. Firstly in the case of the UK e-Science community, scalability issues arise from a central certificate authority. Secondly, the current security mechanisms used by the grid community are not line grained enough. In this paper we outline how these issues are being addressed through the development of a grid computing module supported by an advanced authorisation infrastructure at the University of Glasgow