Knowledge Management and Communities of Practice around Healthcare Digital Libraries

The recent explosion of medical information available in digital libraries on the Internet provides users with overwhelming amount of medical knowledge. Although the number of patients seeking health related information online is steadily growing, the great potential of this revolutionary technology has not been fully exploited. Professionals often cannot find information when and where they need it; members of public are unaware of varying quality of medical information and often seek health advice from unauthorized and misleading Web sites. In addition, little is known about the real impact of medical knowledge provision on clinical care. Based on our experience with the development of real-world government medical digital libraries in the UK (NeLI and AR DL), we will discuss key issues around knowledge management, healthcare ontologies, quality approval and a new opportunity for online communities of practice around healthcare digital libraries

An Improved Focused Crawler: Using Web Page Classification and Link Priority Evaluation

A focused crawler is topic-specific and aims selectively to collect web pages that are relevant to a given topic from the Internet. However, the performance of the current focused crawling can easily suffer the impact of the environments of web pages and multiple topic web pages. In the crawling process, a highly relevant region may be ignored owing to the low overall relevance of that page, and anchor text or link-context may misguide crawlers. In order to solve these problems, this paper proposes a new focused crawler. First, we build a web page classifier based on improved term weighting approach (ITFIDF), in order to gain highly relevant web pages. In addition, this paper introduces an evaluation approach of the link, link priority evaluation (LPE), which combines web page content block partition algorithm and the strategy of joint feature evaluation (JFE), to better judge the relevance between URLs on the web page and the given topic. The experimental results demonstrate that the classifier using ITFIDF outperforms TFIDF, and our focused crawler is superior to other focused crawlers based on breadth-first, best-first, anchor text only, link-context only, and content block partition in terms of harvest rate and target recall. In conclusion, our methods are significant and effective for focused crawler

Flexing Digital Library Systems

Digital library systems with monolithic architectures are rapidly facing extinction as the discipline adopts new practices in software engineering, such as component-based architectures and Web Services. Past projects have attempted to demonstrate and justify the use of components through the construction of systems such as NCSTRL and ScholNet. This paper describes current work to push the boundaries of digital library research and investigate a range of projects made feasible by the availability of suitable components. These projects include: the ability to assemble component-based digital libraries using a visual interface; the design of customisable user interfaces and workflows; the packaging and installation of systems based on formal descriptions; and the shift to a component farm for cluster-like scalability. Each of these sub-projects makes a potential individual contribution to research in architectures, while sharing a common underlying framework. Together, all of these projects support the hypothesis that a consistent component architecture and suite of components can provide the basis for advanced research into flexible digital library architectures

SozioNet: networking social science resources

"SozioNet forms part of a forthcoming national social science information portal, which is currently being developed by the German Infoconnex initiative. Inspired by successful examples like MathNet or SOSIG, SozioNet provides access to freely available web resources with relevance to social science. It is based on a network of social science institutions and scientists, to agree on and establish common metadata standards. SozioNet implements a general infrastructure for the creation of semantically rich metadata, and for the harvesting and retrieval of relevant resources with a domain specific focus." (author's abstract

Building and Using Digital Libraries for ETDs

Despite the high value of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), the global collection has seen limited use. To extend such use, a new approach to building digital libraries (DLs) is needed. Fortunately, recent decades have seen that a vast amount of “gray literature” has become available through a diverse set of institutional repositories as well as regional and national libraries and archives. Most of the works in those collections include ETDs and are often freely available in keeping with the open-access movement, but such access is limited by the services of supporting information systems. As explained through a set of scenarios, ETDs can better meet the needs of diverse stakeholders if customer discovery methods are used to identify personas and user roles as well as their goals and tasks. Hence, DLs, with a rich collection of services, as well as newer, more advanced ones, can be organized so that those services, and expanded workflows building on them, can be adapted to meet personalized goals as well as traditional ones, such as discovery and exploration

Scientific work and the usage of digital scientific information - some notes on structures, discrepancies, tendencies, and strategies

"The article discusses changes in scientific work (academic and applied) associated with new potentials, but also coercions of information technologies. Background for this interest is the experience gained in several digital library projects that inclinations and willingness to use these technical possibilities is much less common than the developers of these systems, and we all, tended to think in recent years. This seems to be true even in those scientific disciplines which were and are at the forefront of the development, e.g. physics, mathematics, etc. The background for this observation is discussed looking at general economic and social changes, viewing the environments of work in the scientific sphere, the contents and their quantity and quality of supply in scientific IT systems, the user side in their communities of practice, and the technological and organizational basis of scientific information. Some strategic issues to improve the situation are discussed in the final part of the paper." (author's abstract

Digital library : a bibliography of major information sources

Bibliografia internacional anotada sobre as principais fontes de informação lançadas a partir de 2000, relacionadas à biblioteca digital. Os tópicos cobertos são as bibliografias mais recentes, os livros e manuais, os periódicos especializados, os eventos específicos, as listas de discussão, os grupos e centros de pesquisa, os cursos e treinamentos e as principais organizações. _______________________________________________________________________________________ ABSTRACTInternational annotated bibliography about the major information sources related to digital library. The topics covered are: most recent bibliographies, books and manuals, specialized journals, specialized conferences, discussion lists, research groups and centers, training courses and major organizations

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

Building Interoperable Vocabulary and Structures for Learning Objects

The structural, functional, and production views on learning objects influence metadata structure and vocabulary. We drew on these views and conducted a literature review and in-depth analysis of 14 learning objects and over 500 components in these learning objects to model the knowledge framework for a learning object ontology. The learning object ontology reported in this paper consists of 8 top-level classes, 28 classes at the second level, and 34 at the third level. Except class Learning object, all other classes have the three properties of preferred term, related term, and synonym. To validate the ontology, we conducted a query log analysis that focused on discovering what terms users have used at both conceptual and word levels. The findings show that the main classes in the ontology are either conceptually or linguistically similar to the top terms in the query log data. We built an Exercise Editor as an informal experiment to test its ability to be adopted in authoring tools. The main contribution of this project is in the framework for the learning object domain and methodology used to develop and validate an ontology

Metadata harvesting for content-based distributed information retrieval

We propose an approach to content-based Distributed Information Retrieval based on the periodic and incremental centralisation of full content indices of widely dispersed and autonomously managed document sources. Inspired by the success of the Open Archive Initiative’s protocol for metadata harvesting, the approach occupies middle ground between content crawling and distributed retrieval. As in crawling, some data moves towards the retrieval process, but it is statistics about the content rather than content itself; this grants more efficient use of network resources and wider scope of application. As in distributed retrieval, some processing is distributed along with the data, but it is indexing rather than retrieval; this reduces the costs of content provision whilst promoting the simplicity, effectiveness, and responsiveness of retrieval. Overall, we argue that the approach retains the good properties of centralised retrieval without renouncing to cost-effective, large-scale resource pooling. We discuss the requirements associated with the approach and identify two strategies to deploy it on top of the OAI infrastructure. In particular, we define a minimal extension of the OAI protocol which supports the coordinated harvesting of full-content indices and descriptive metadata for content resources. Finally, we report on the implementation of a proof-of-concept prototype service for multi-model content-based retrieval of distributed file collections