Digital library software architectures : TeachEngineering case study

Digital libraries are digitally accessible, organized collections of knowledge. Although under this broad definition any digitally accessible data set might be considered a digital library, the term is generally reserved for collections whose structures are carefully documented and made available in the form of so-called metadata. There is no specific approach to build a digital library as builders typically use their own architectures which serves only their purpose and satisfies their target audience. These approaches are sometimes hard to understand. In this project, Fm presenting a Best Practices for Digital Library Software Architectures after a careful study of existing architectures and comparing these architectures with the TeachEngineering Digital Library Architecture

Where My Books Go: Choice and Place in Digital Reading

Digital reading is a topic of rising interest in digital libraries, particularly in terms of optimizing the reading experience. However, there is relatively little data on the patterns of digital reading, including issues of where and what users read, and how they organize, plan and conduct their reading sessions. This paper reports the first data on mobile reading, combining insights from three different studies of users, including diary studies, interviews and ethnomethodological work. The data reveals that reading often depends on highly developed and rehearsed practices, especially when the reading is related to study or research. From this, we are able to identify a number of opportunities for further digital library research to better support the needs of users

Repositório digital pessoal semântico baseado na “cloud”

Doutoramento em InformáticaAo longo do tempo os indivíduos procuraram sempre formas de preservar o conhecimento, recordações e experiencias de vida. A busca por suportes estáveis que possam preservar as recordações dos efeitos da passagem do tempo leva à projeção das mesmas sobre objetos físicos. Estes objetos eventualmente são agregados em coleções que representam partes das vidas dos seus criadores, e que que podem ser partilhadas com outras pessoas. O uso generalizado das tecnologias da informação, conjuntamente com a sua simplicidade trouxe consigo uma mudança de paradigma, levando a que muitas interações que poderiam criar objetos físicos sobre os quais seriam projetadas recordações passassem do mundo físico para o mundo digital passando a criar objetos digitais, sobre os quais também podem ser projetadas recordações, tal como o que acontece com os seus equivalentes físicos. Devido a sua natureza digital estes objetos são simples de criar, manipular, duplicar e partilhar. Estas características colocam-nos numa posição em que podem ser gerados facilmente, usado para transmitir conteúdo aparentemente trivial que é depois partilhado e prontamente esquecido. No entanto, apesar destes objetos poderem passar a incorporar memorias, a combinação do excesso de confiança nas suas características intrínsecas e de uma atitude que convida ao esquecimento acabam por impedir este desfecho, o que pode levar a que no futuro os indivíduos percam o acesso a estes objetos. O trabalho desenvolvido ao longo desta tese foca-se sobre este problema, propondo resolve-lo com a criação de um sistema de repositórios digitais pessoas para a recolha de informação sobre o conteúdo pessoal de cada individuo. Em vez de se focar na recolha do conteúdo propriamente dita, um repositório digital pessoal dá prioridade à recolha de metadados sobre o conteúdo (desde que este não esteja em perigo iminente) de forma a no futuro poder guiar os indivíduos de volta aos serviços na “nuvem” onde o conteúdo ainda reside no seu contexto original. Em cenários pessoais não é viável recorrer a pessoal especializado para proceder a recolha e seleção destes dados. Para mitigar este problema, os dados são recolhidos o mais cedo e próximo da origem quanto possível por agentes de recolha. Estes foram desenhados de forma a minimizar a intrusão nas rotinas dos seus utilizadores, ao mesmo tempo que oferecem serviços complementares que podem ser utilizados de forma independente do repositório digital pessoal, fomentando assim a adoção do uso destes agentes. Este trabalho também descreve uma proposta de extensão ao modelo CIDOC/CRM, utilizado para classificar e organizar a informação recolhida. Esta extensão foi criada devido à necessidade de dotar o modelo de novas entidades e propriedades destinadas a lidar com objetos digitais e cenários pessoais.Throughout time individuals have always sought forms to preserve their knowledge, memories and life experiences. Physical objects provide a medium upon which individuals are able to project their memories, in an attempt that they remain in a stable support better able to cope with the passage of time. Physical objects eventually coalesce into a collection that comes to represent part of its owners’ lives and that can eventually be passed on to others. Widespread use of information technologies, coupled with their perceived ease of use has shifted many interactions that would end up producing external memory objects from the physical to the digital realm. As with their physical counterparts, digital objects can also be used by individuals to project their memories. Due to their digital nature, these objects are simple to create, produce, manipulate, duplicate and share. These traits place them into a position where they can be generated without too much effort to convey what might appear to be trivial content, readily shared and forgotten afterwards. Though, through memory projection they could become part of their creator’s legacy, overconfidence in their reproducibility and being forgotten can prevent them from being so. This deprives their creators from part of their lives that, in spite of appearing trivial at first, might acquire a deeper meaning with the passage of time. The work done throughout this thesis addresses this issue by proposing the creation of personal digital repositories to collect information regarding personal content. Instead of focusing on collecting the content itself, the personal digital repository prioritises gathering metadata about the content (when not immediately at risk) in order to lead its owner back to the “cloud” applications where the content can still be found in its original context. In personal scenarios it is not feasible to rely on trained personnel to help with content gathering and organisation. To mitigate this issue, content is collected as soon as possible by collection agents. These are designed to be as unobtrusive as possible, also offering additional services that can be used even without the personal digital repository in order to encourage their adoption. This creates an intertwined ecosystem where the content collection agents feed the personal digital repository and can in turn use previously collected content to support their additional services. This work also describes a proposed extension to the CIDOC/CRM model, used to classify and organise the collected information. The extension was created due to a perceived gap in the CIDOC/CRM model when it came to dealing with digital objects

C-Band Airport Surface Communications System Standards Development. Phase II Final Report. Volume 1: Concepts of Use, Initial System Requirements, Architecture, and AeroMACS Design Considerations

This report is provided as part of ITT s NASA Glenn Research Center Aerospace Communication Systems Technical Support (ACSTS) contract NNC05CA85C, Task 7: New ATM Requirements-Future Communications, C-Band and L-Band Communications Standard Development and was based on direction provided by FAA project-level agreements for New ATM Requirements-Future Communications. Task 7 included two subtasks. Subtask 7-1 addressed C-band (5091- to 5150-MHz) airport surface data communications standards development, systems engineering, test bed and prototype development, and tests and demonstrations to establish operational capability for the Aeronautical Mobile Airport Communications System (AeroMACS). Subtask 7-2 focused on systems engineering and development support of the L-band digital aeronautical communications system (L-DACS). Subtask 7-1 consisted of two phases. Phase I included development of AeroMACS concepts of use, requirements, architecture, and initial high-level safety risk assessment. Phase II builds on Phase I results and is presented in two volumes. Volume I (this document) is devoted to concepts of use, system requirements, and architecture, including AeroMACS design considerations. Volume II describes an AeroMACS prototype evaluation and presents final AeroMACS recommendations. This report also describes airport categorization and channelization methodologies. The purposes of the airport categorization task were (1) to facilitate initial AeroMACS architecture designs and enable budgetary projections by creating a set of airport categories based on common airport characteristics and design objectives, and (2) to offer high-level guidance to potential AeroMACS technology and policy development sponsors and service providers. A channelization plan methodology was developed because a common global methodology is needed to assure seamless interoperability among diverse AeroMACS services potentially supplied by multiple service providers

Paperspace : a novel approach to document management by combining paper and digital documents

Personal document management systems provide good support for storing and organizing digital documents. However, there are no computer tools that support organization of paper documents on our desks. We ran a study of people's organization of their office desk space with respect to their digital workspace. This study resulted in a set of requirements for a media bridging tool. Based on these requirements, we built a prototype media bridging tool called PaperSpace that uses computer vision to link paper and digital documents. The system also tracks piles of paper documents on the real desktop, and links those papers to digital documents stored in the computer. Digital documents can be sorted and grouped according to the physical layout of the corresponding papers on the desk. The system automatically creates digital piles of documents in a simulated desktop that reflect the paper piles on the real desktop. The user can access valuable information through the system, such as printing statistics, location of a printed document on the desk, and past projects and their documents. A two week user evaluation of the system showed interesting usage scenarios and future trends for improving user interaction

Web Archive Services Framework for Tighter Integration Between the Past and Present Web

Web archives have contained the cultural history of the web for many years, but they still have a limited capability for access. Most of the web archiving research has focused on crawling and preservation activities, with little focus on the delivery methods. The current access methods are tightly coupled with web archive infrastructure, hard to replicate or integrate with other web archives, and do not cover all the users\u27 needs. In this dissertation, we focus on the access methods for archived web data to enable users, third-party developers, researchers, and others to gain knowledge from the web archives. We build ArcSys, a new service framework that extracts, preserves, and exposes APIs for the web archive corpus. The dissertation introduces a novel categorization technique to divide the archived corpus into four levels. For each level, we will propose suitable services and APIs that enable both users and third-party developers to build new interfaces. The first level is the content level that extracts the content from the archived web data. We develop ArcContent to expose the web archive content processed through various filters. The second level is the metadata level; we extract the metadata from the archived web data and make it available to users. We implement two services, ArcLink for temporal web graph and ArcThumb for optimizing the thumbnail creation in the web archives. The third level is the URI level that focuses on using the URI HTTP redirection status to enhance the user query. Finally, the highest level in the web archiving service framework pyramid is the archive level. In this level, we define the web archive by the characteristics of its corpus and building Web Archive Profiles. The profiles are used by the Memento Aggregator for query optimization

A two-stage framework for designing visual analytics systems to augment organizational analytical processes

A perennially interesting research topic in the field of visual analytics is how to effectively develop systems that support organizational knowledge worker’s decision-making and reasoning processes. The primary objective of a visual analytic system is to facilitate analytical reasoning and discovery of insights through interactive visual interfaces. It also enables the transfer of capability and expertise from where it resides to where it is needed–across individuals, and organizations as necessary. The problem is, however, most domain analytical practices generally vary from organizations to organizations. This leads to the diversified design of visual analytics systems in incorporating domain analytical processes, making it difficult to generalize the success from one domain to another. Exacerbating this problem is the dearth of general models of analytical workflows available to enable such timely and effective designs. To alleviate these problems, this dissertation presents a two-stage framework for informing the design of a visual analytics system. This two-stage design framework builds upon and extends current practices pertaining to analytical workflow and focuses, in particular, on investigating its effect on the design of visual analytics systems for organizational environments. It aims to empower organizations with more systematic and purposeful information analyses through modeling the domain users’ reasoning processes. The first stage in this framework is an Observation and Designing stage, in which a visual analytic system is designed and implemented to abstract and encapsulate general organizational analytical processes, through extensive collaboration with domain users. The second stage is the User-centric Refinement stage, which aims at interactively enriching and refining the already encapsulated domain analysis process based on understanding user’s intentions through analyzing their task behavior. To implement this framework in the process of designing a visual analytics system, this dissertation proposes four general design recommendations that, when followed, empower such systems to bring the users closer to the center of their analytical processes. This dissertation makes three primary contributions: first, it presents a general characterization of the analytical workflow in organizational environments. This characterization fills in the blank of the current lack of such an analytical model and further represents a set of domain analytical tasks that are commonly applicable to various organizations. Secondly, this dissertation describes a two-stage framework for facilitating the domain users’ workflows through integrating their analytical models into interactive visual analytics systems. Finally, this dissertation presents recommendations and suggestions on enriching and refining domain analysis through capturing and analyzing knowledge workers’ analysis processes. To exemplify the generalizability of these design recommendations, this dissertation presents three visual analytics systems that are developed following the proposed recommendations, including Taste for Xerox Corporation, OpsVis for Microsoft, and IRSV for the U.S. Department of Transportation. All of these systems are deployed to domain knowledge workers and are adopted for their analytical practices. Extensive empirical evaluations are further conducted to demonstrate efficacy of these systems in facilitating domain analytical processes