1,467 research outputs found

    XQuery for Archivists: Understanding EAD Finding Aids as Data

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    [Excerpt] XQuery is a simple, yet powerful, scripting language designed to enable users without formal programming training to extract, transform, and manipulate XML data. Moreover, the language is an accepted standard and a W3C recommendation much like its sister standards, XML and XSLT. In other words, XQuery’s raison d’etre coincides perfectly with the needs of today’s archivists. What follows is a brief, pragmatic, overview of XQuery for archivists that will enable archivists with a keen understanding of XML, XPath, and EAD to begin experimenting with manipulating EAD data using XQuery

    Software Reuse across Robotic Platforms: Limiting the effects of diversity

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    Robots have diverse capabilities and complex interactions with their environment. Software development for robotic platforms is time consuming due to the complex nature of the tasks to be performed. Such an environment demands sound software engineering practices to produce high quality software. However software engineering in the robotics domain fails to facilitate any significant level of software reuse or portability. This paper identifies the major issues limiting software reuse in the robotics domain. Lack of standardisation, diversity of robotic platforms, and the subtle effects of environmental interaction all contribute to this problem. It is then shown that software components, fuzzy logic, and related techniques can be used together to address this problem. While complete software reuse is not possible, it is demonstrated that significant levels of software reuse can be obtained. Without an acceptable level of reuse or portability, software engineering in the robotics domain will not be able to meet the demands of a rapidly developing field. The work presented in this paper demonstrates a method for supporting software reuse across robotic platforms and hence facilitating improved software engineering practices

    Engineering polymer informatics: Towards the computer-aided design of polymers

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    The computer-aided design of polymers is one of the holy grails of modern chemical informatics and of significant interest for a number of communities in polymer science. The paper outlines a vision for the in silico design of polymers and presents an information model for polymers based on modern semantic web technologies, thus laying the foundations for achieving the vision

    Web Content Extraction - a Meta-Analysis of its Past and Thoughts on its Future

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    In this paper, we present a meta-analysis of several Web content extraction algorithms, and make recommendations for the future of content extraction on the Web. First, we find that nearly all Web content extractors do not consider a very large, and growing, portion of modern Web pages. Second, it is well understood that wrapper induction extractors tend to break as the Web changes; heuristic/feature engineering extractors were thought to be immune to a Web site's evolution, but we find that this is not the case: heuristic content extractor performance also tends to degrade over time due to the evolution of Web site forms and practices. We conclude with recommendations for future work that address these and other findings.Comment: Accepted for publication in SIGKDD Exploration

    Python for Archivists: Breaking Down Barriers Between Systems

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    [Excerpt] Working with a multitude of digital tools is now a core part of an archivist’s skillset. We work with collection management systems, digital asset management systems, public access systems, ticketing or request systems, local databases, general web applications, and systems built on smaller systems linked through application programming interfaces (APIs). Over the past years, more and more of these applications have evolved to meet a variety of archival processes. We no longer expect a single tool to solve all our needs and embraced the “separation of concerns” design principle that smaller, problem-specific and modular systems are more effective than large monolithic tools that try to do everything. All of this has made the lives of archivists easier and empowered us to make our collections more accessible to our users. Yet, this landscape can be difficult to manage. How do we get all of these systems that rely on different software and use data in different ways to talk to one another in ways that help, rather than hinder, our day to day tasks? How do we develop workflows that span these different tools while performing complex processes that are still compliant with archival theory and standards? How costly is it to maintain these relationships over time as our workflows evolve and grow? How do we make all these new methods simple and easy to learn for new professionals and keep archives from being even more esoteric

    Las posibilidades de EAD (Encoded Archival Description) 2002 para la descripción archivística multinivel: Un caso concreto de aplicación

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    Se presenta EAD (Encoded Archival Description) versión 2002 como estándar de facto para el tratamiento y difusión de instrumentos tradicionales de descripción archivística. Se analiza, comenta y critica el sistema previsto en EAD para tratar instrumentos de descripción a dos o más niveles. Así, se expone el mecanismo general habilitado y se relaciona con la definición y las cuatro reglas de descripción multinivel enunciadas en la Norma internacional general de descripción archivística ISAD(G); se analizan los niveles que contempla de forma estándar, también comparados con los previstos en ISAD(G), y las diversas posibilidades y alternativas disponibles en EAD en relación con la descripción multinivel; finalmente se critican aquellos aspectos susceptibles de simplificación o mejora. Se cita un caso real de aplicación de EAD 2002 a un instrumento de descripción archivística multinivel: la versión electrónica del Catálogo de Pergaminos del Archivo Municipal de Córdoba
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