HILT IV : subject interoperability through building and embedding pilot terminology web services

A report of work carried out within the JISC-funded HILT Phase IV project, the paper looks at the project's context against the background of other recent and ongoing terminologies work, describes its outcome and conclusions, including technical outcomes and terminological characteristics, and considers possible future research and development directions. The Phase IV project has taken HILT to the point where the launch of an operational support service in the area of subject interoperability is a feasible option and where both investigation of specific needs in this area and practical collaborative work are sensible and feasible next steps. Moving forward requires detailed work, not only on terminology interoperability and associated service delivery issues, but also on service and end user needs and engagement, service sustainability issues, and the practicalities of interworking with other terminology services and projects in UK, Europe, and global contexts

HILT : High-Level Thesaurus Project. Phase IV and Embedding Project Extension : Final Report

Ensuring that Higher Education (HE) and Further Education (FE) users of the JISC IE can find appropriate learning, research and information resources by subject search and browse in an environment where most national and institutional service providers - usually for very good local reasons - use different subject schemes to describe their resources is a major challenge facing the JISC domain (and, indeed, other domains beyond JISC). Encouraging the use of standard terminologies in some services (institutional repositories, for example) is a related challenge. Under the auspices of the HILT project, JISC has been investigating mechanisms to assist the community with this problem through a JISC Shared Infrastructure Service that would help optimise the value obtained from expenditure on content and services by facilitating subject-search-based resource sharing to benefit users in the learning and research communities. The project has been through a number of phases, with work from earlier phases reported, both in published work elsewhere, and in project reports (see the project website: http://hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/). HILT Phase IV had two elements - the core project, whose focus was 'to research, investigate and develop pilot solutions for problems pertaining to cross-searching multi-subject scheme information environments, as well as providing a variety of other terminological searching aids', and a short extension to encompass the pilot embedding of routines to interact with HILT M2M services in the user interfaces of various information services serving the JISC community. Both elements contributed to the developments summarised in this report

Conceptual Linking: Ontology-based Open Hypermedia

This paper describes the attempts of the COHSE project to define and deploy a Conceptual Open Hypermedia Service. Consisting of • an ontological reasoning service which is used to represent a sophisticated conceptual model of document terms and their relationships; • a Web-based open hypermedia link service that can offer a range of different link-providing facilities in a scalable and non-intrusive fashion; and integrated to form a conceptual hypermedia system to enable documents to be linked via metadata describing their contents and hence to improve the consistency and breadth of linking of WWW documents at retrieval time (as readers browse the documents) and authoring time (as authors create the documents)

Conceptual Linking: Ontology-based Open Hypermedia

This paper describes the attempts of the COHSE project to define and deploy a Conceptual Open Hypermedia Service. Consisting of • an ontological reasoning service which is used to represent a sophisticated conceptual model of document terms and their relationships; • a Web-based open hypermedia link service that can offer a range of different link-providing facilities in a scalable and non-intrusive fashion; and integrated to form a conceptual hypermedia system to enable documents to be linked via metadata describing their contents and hence to improve the consistency and breadth of linking of WWW documents at retrieval time (as readers browse the documents) and authoring time (as authors create the documents)

Japanese/English Cross-Language Information Retrieval: Exploration of Query Translation and Transliteration

Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), where queries and documents are in different languages, has of late become one of the major topics within the information retrieval community. This paper proposes a Japanese/English CLIR system, where we combine a query translation and retrieval modules. We currently target the retrieval of technical documents, and therefore the performance of our system is highly dependent on the quality of the translation of technical terms. However, the technical term translation is still problematic in that technical terms are often compound words, and thus new terms are progressively created by combining existing base words. In addition, Japanese often represents loanwords based on its special phonogram. Consequently, existing dictionaries find it difficult to achieve sufficient coverage. To counter the first problem, we produce a Japanese/English dictionary for base words, and translate compound words on a word-by-word basis. We also use a probabilistic method to resolve translation ambiguity. For the second problem, we use a transliteration method, which corresponds words unlisted in the base word dictionary to their phonetic equivalents in the target language. We evaluate our system using a test collection for CLIR, and show that both the compound word translation and transliteration methods improve the system performance

Preview Cues: Enhancing Access to Multimedia Content

We describe preview cues, a lightweight mechanism to assist exploration of multimedia content. A preview cue provides a preview of the kind of content/information associated with an area (as opposed to an instance) of a domain. Preview cues associate media files and their meta data with the label of a topic in a domain. A lightweight gesture such as brushing a cursor over a label initiates playback of the preview cue file associated with that label. With these cues, users can preview the type of content associated with an area of a domain in order to decide whether or not that area is of interest for further exploration before having to select it. In this paper we describe the preview cues mechanism. We look at one case study of an implementation of preview cues in the audio domain, and we present the results of a user study of preview cue deployment. We conclude with a discussion of issues for future research

Linked Heritage Experience in Linking Heritage Information

The Linked Heritage Project started in April 2011. It is funded by the European Commission under the IST Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP), and runs for 30 months. Its main objective is to contribute a large quantity of new content to Europeana, from both the public and private sectors (c3 million items). In addition, the project will show how: 1. To enhance the quality of Europeana content, in terms of its metadata richness, its re-use potential and its uniqueness; 2. To enable improved search, retrieval and use of Europeana content. The author is working in this project, specifically as lead partner in the work package Linking Cultural Heritage Information. This will, amongst other things, be exploring best practice report on cultural heritage linked data and metadata standards. This paper will give some results of the research that has been undertaken. Questions that will be answered include: “What is linked data? Is all of it Open? Which standards are being used? What use is being made of linked a data in cultural heritage at the moment?”.The Linked Heritage Project started in April 2011. It is funded by the European Commission under the IST Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP), and runs for 30 months. Its main objective is to contribute a large quantity of new content to Europeana, from both the public and private sectors (c3 million items). In addition, the project will show how: 1. To enhance the quality of Europeana content, in terms of its metadata richness, its re-use potential and its uniqueness; 2. To enable improved search, retrieval and use of Europeana content. The author is working in this project, specifically as lead partner in the work package Linking Cultural Heritage Information. This will, amongst other things, be exploring best practice report on cultural heritage linked data and metadata standards. This paper will give some results of the research that has been undertaken. Questions that will be answered include: “What is linked data? Is all of it Open? Which standards are being used? What use is being made of linked a data in cultural heritage at the moment?”

Hytexpros : a hypermedia information retrieval system

The Hypermedia information retrieval system makes use of the specific capabilities of hypermedia systems with information retrieval operations and provides new kind of information management tools. It combines both hypermedia and information retrieval to offer end-users the possibility of navigating, browsing and searching a large collection of documents to satisfy an information need. TEXPROS is an intelligent document processing and retrieval system that supports storing, extracting, classifying, categorizing, retrieval and browsing enterprise information. TEXPROS is a perfect application to apply hypermedia information retrieval techniques. In this dissertation, we extend TEXPROS to a hypermedia information retrieval system called HyTEXPROS with hypertext functionalities, such as node, typed and weighted links, anchors, guided-tours, network overview, bookmarks, annotations and comments, and external linkbase. It describes the whole information base including the metadata and the original documents as network nodes connected by links. Through hypertext functionalities, a user can construct dynamically an information path by browsing through pieces of the information base. By adding hypertext functionalities to TEXPROS, HyTEXPROS is created. It changes its working domain from a personal document process domain to a personal library domain accompanied with citation techniques to process original documents. A four-level conceptual architecture is presented as the system architecture of HyTEXPROS. Such architecture is also referred to as the reference model of HyTEXPROS. Detailed description of HyTEXPROS, using the First Order Logic Calculus, is also proposed. An early version of a prototype is briefly described