Smart Search in Newspaper Archives Using Topic Maps

The OmniPaper project has implemented three information retrieval prototypes in the area of electronic news publishing. One prototype uses SOAP as communication protocol between the central system and a number of distributed news archives. The second prototype uses an RDF metadata database, enabling direct metadata queries to the central system. Finally the Topic Map prototype uses query expansion and semantic linking for smart metadata search. The Topic Map prototype enhances thesearch experience by implementing a knowledge layer that combines the semantic content of a lexical database, consisting of concepts and keywords, with a metadata-set of newspaper articles. The linking between both is currently implemented at the level of keywords but will be developed at the level of concepts in the final prototype. The knowledge layer has been designed from a Topic Map point of view, although the XTM syntax has not been used to avoid performance issues. The consortium’s adopted view on information publishing and retrieval considers querying and navigation as two very related actions that can both be captured under the name “search for relevant information”. Navigation forces the user to followpredefined paths whereas querying enables the user to look freely for a suitable starting point. The query and navigation functionality is provided through a web engine and is build on top of the information structure of the knowledge layer

Horizon Report 2009

El informe anual Horizon investiga, identifica y clasifica las tecnologías emergentes que los expertos que lo elaboran prevén tendrán un impacto en la enseñanza aprendizaje, la investigación y la producción creativa en el contexto educativo de la enseñanza superior. También estudia las tendencias clave que permiten prever el uso que se hará de las mismas y los retos que ellos suponen para las aulas. Cada edición identifica seis tecnologías o prácticas. Dos cuyo uso se prevé emergerá en un futuro inmediato (un año o menos) dos que emergerán a medio plazo (en dos o tres años) y dos previstas a más largo plazo (5 años)

Design of metadata elements for digital news articles in the omnipaper project

This paper examines and proposes a set of metadata elements for describing digital news articles for the benefit of distributed and heterogeneous news resource discovery. Existing digital news description standards such as NITF and NewsML are analysed and compared with Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES), which results in that the use of Dublin Core is encouraged for interoperability of the resources. The suggested metadata elements are carefully selected and defined considering the characteristics of news articles. Some elements are detailed with refinement qualifiers and recommended encoding scheme. This set of metadata has been developed as a part of the tasks in the IST (Information Society Technologies)-funded European project OmniPaper (Smart Access to European Newspapers, IST-2001-32174)

Towards Affordable Disclosure of Spoken Word Archives

This paper presents and discusses ongoing work aiming at affordable disclosure of real-world spoken word archives in general, and in particular of a collection of recorded interviews with Dutch survivors of World War II concentration camp Buchenwald. Given such collections, the least we want to be able to provide is search at different levels and a flexible way of presenting results. Strategies for automatic annotation based on speech recognition – supporting e.g., within-document search– are outlined and discussed with respect to the Buchenwald interview collection. In addition, usability aspects of the spoken word search are discussed on the basis of our experiences with the online Buchenwald web portal. It is concluded that, although user feedback is generally fairly positive, automatic annotation performance is still far from satisfactory, and requires additional research

Metadata elements for digital news resource description

This paper examines and proposes a set of metadata elements for describing digital news articles for the benefit of distributed and heterogeneous news resource discovery. Existing digital news description standards such as NITF and NewsML are analysed and compared with Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES), which results in that the use of Dublin Core is encouraged for interoperability of the resources. The suggested metadata elements are carefully selected and defined considering the characteristics of news articles. Some elements are detailed with refinement qualifiers and recommended encoding scheme. This set of metadata has been developed as a part of the tasks in the IST (Information Society Technologies)-funded European project OmniPaper (Smart Access to European Newspapers, IST-2001-32174)

Implementation of metadata for OmniPaper RDF prototype

Information Society Technologies (IST) funded OmniPaper project investigates efficient ways for access to distributed and heterogeneous digital news archives using state-of-the-art technologies such as RDF, XTM and SOAP. An approach taken is to create small prototypes based on each of them. This paper presents the first stage of the prototype development, particularly of RDF approach, including analysis on existing news text format standards and metadata vocabularies, definition of metadata elements for OmniPaper, implementation of application profile and RDF schema and development of the RDF prototype in a web-based RDF specific application. The elaborated analysis shows that Dublin Core Metadata Element Set has to be a principal vocabulary to implement the OmniPaper application profile as it provides greater interoperability. The RDF prototype provides RDF “metadatabase” with searchable interface for simple and advance search on the defined metadata elements