Navigating through archives, libraries and museums: Topic Maps as a harmonizing instrument

The paper deals with the possibility of creating a topic map based system where different sectors of cultural heritage would interact with users, by monitoring the navigation histories of users and the statistics on the searches, in order to authorize variant form of names. The problem of managing different sectors and harmonizing them both from a structural and a semantic view point, by using Topic Maps, is also discussed. With regards to this, we are introducing two projects, which are largely based on the above mention use of Topic Maps. The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com http://www.springerlink.com/content/6k5473124678k452/fulltext.pd

An Updated Portrait of the Portuguese Web

This study presents an updated characterization of the Portuguese Web derived from a crawl of 48 million contents belonging to all media types (2.5 TB of data), performed in March, 2008. The resulting data was analyzed to characterize contents, sites and domains. This study was performed within the scope of the Portuguese Web Archive.POSC/EU, UMI

The Transition to an Electric Journal Collection: Measuring the Operational and Economic Implications

The overall objective of this study is to evaluate the economic implications of converting the entire current journal collection of a university library to an all digital format. This is an applied research project, the results of which will be useful to those who fund and manage digital library collections as well as other library staff and persons involved in training the library workforce of the future

Evaluating and combining digital video shot boundary detection algorithms

The development of standards for video encoding coupled with the increased power of computing mean that content-based manipulation of digital video information is now feasible. Shots are a basic structural building block of digital video and the boundaries between shots need to be determined automatically to allow for content-based manipulation. A shot can be thought of as continuous images from one camera at a time. In this paper we examine a variety of automatic techniques for shot boundary detection that we have implemented and evaluated on a baseline of 720,000 frames (8 hours) of broadcast television. This extends our previous work on evaluating a single technique based on comparing colour histograms. A description of each of our three methods currently working is given along with how they are evaluated. It is found that although the different methods have about the same order of magnitude in terms of effectiveness, different shot boundaries are detected by the different methods. We then look at combining the three shot boundary detection methods to produce one output result and the benefits in accuracy and performance that this brought to our system. Each of the methods were changed from using a static threshold value for three unconnected methods to one using three dynamic threshold values for one connected method. In a final summing up we look at the future directions for this work

User interface design for keyframe-based browsing of digital video

In this paper we describe a structured approach for the development of user interfaces for the Fíchlár video browsing system, a web-based system for recording, browsing and playback of TV programmes. The user interface to the system was originally designed for desktop use with a large screen and a mouse and we are currently developing versions suitable for mobile device (PDA) access to the system. We review a design framework for video browsing interface formats and some of the formats developed for desktop and PDA use, including interfaces for the Psion Revo and Compaq iPAQ PDAs. This work is driven by the need to investigate how best to include the user in the content specification and retrieval loop and how to and the various balance points between user interaction and system automation

Metadata in support of subject gateway services and digital preservation

This paper provides an introduction to two of the metadata-related projects in which UKOLN has been a partner. It first describes the development of services known as quality controlled subject gateways and looks in more detail at the Resource Discovery Network and the EU Renardus project. It then provides an outline of recent preservation metadata initiatives and describes the way the OAIS model has been used in the Cedars project

StreamOnTheFly: a Peer-to-peer network for radio stations and podCasters

The StreamOnTheFly network demonstrates new ways of management and personalisation technologies for audio. The architecture is based on a decentralized network of software components using automatic metadata replication in a peer-to-peer manner. The network also promotes a new common metadata schema and content exchange format. Content reuse and content exchange is made possible by StreamOnTheFly in several use cases