mSpace meets EPrints: a Case Study in Creating Dynamic Digital Collections

In this case study we look at issues involved in (a) generating dynamic digital libraries that are on a particular topic but span heterogeneous collections at distinct sites, (b) supplementing the artefacts in that collection with additional information available either from databases at the artefact's home or from the Web at large, and (c) providing an interaction paradigm that will support effective exploration of this new resource. We describe how we used two available frameworks, mSpace and EPrints to support this kind of collection building. The result of the study is a set of recommendations to improve the connectivity of remote resources both to one another and to related Web resources, and that will also reduce problems like co-referencing in order to enable the creation of new collections on demand

mSpace: improving information access to multimedia domains with multimodal exploratory search

Overview of mSpace interaction approach for presenting exploratory search particularly in the audio domain by using slices, preview cues, and user-determined organization of information from high-dimensional space

Webbox+Page Blossom: exploring design for AKTive data interaction

We give away our data to multiple data services without, for the most part, being able to get that data back to reuse in any other way, leaving us, at best, to re-find, re-cover, retype, remember and re-manage this material. In this work in progress, we hypothesize that if we facilitate easy interaction to store, access and reuse our personal, social and public data, we will not only decrease time spent to recreate it for multiple walled data contexts, but in particular, we will develop novel interactions for new kinds of knowledge building. To facilitate exploration of this hypothesis, we propose Page Blossom an exemplar of such dynamic data interaction that is based on data reuse via our open data platform Webbox + Active (active knowledge technology) lenses

Using pivots to explore heterogeneous collections: A case study in musicology

In order to provide a better e-research environment for musicologists, the musicSpace project has partnered with musicology’s leading data publishers, aggregated and enriched their data, and developed a richly featured exploratory search interface to access the combined dataset. There have been several significant challenges to developing this service, and intensive collaboration between musicologists (the domain experts) and computer scientists (who developed the enabling technologies) was required. One challenge was the actual aggregation of the data itself, as this was supplied adhering to a wide variety of different schemas and vocabularies. Although the domain experts expended much time and effort in analysing commonalities in the data, as data sources of increasing complexity were added earlier decisions regarding the design of the aggregated schema, particularly decisions made with reference to simpler data sources, were often revisited to take account of unanticipated metadata types. Additionally, in many domains a single source may be considered to be definitive for certain types of information. In musicology, this is essentially the case with the “works lists” of composers’ musical compositions given in Grove Music Online (http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/public/book/omo_gmo), and so for musicSpace, we have mapped all sources to the works lists from Grove for the purposes of exploration, specifically to exploit the accuracy of its metadata in respect to dates of publication, catalogue numbers, and so on. Therefore, rather than mapping all fields from Grove to a central model, it would be far quicker (in terms of development time) to create a system to “pull-in” data from other sources that are mapped directly to the Grove works lists

musicSpace: integrating musicology's heterogeneous data sources

A significant barrier to the research endeavours of musicologists (and humanities scholars more generally) is the sheer amount of potentially relevant information that has accumulated over centuries. Whereas researchers once faced the daunting prospect of physically scouring through endless primary and secondary sources in order to answer the basic whats, wheres and whens of history, these sources and the data they contain are now increasingly available online. Yet the vast increase in the online availability of data, the heterogeneity of this data, the plethora of data providers, and, moreover, the inability of current search tools to manipulate metadata in useful and intelligent ways, means that extracting large tranches of basic factual information or running multi-part search queries is still enormously and needlessly time consuming. Accordingly, the musicSpace project is exploiting Semantic Web technologies (Berners-Lee et al., 2001) to develop a search interface that integrates access to musicology’s largest and most significant online resources. This will make previously intractable search queries tractable, thus allowing our users to spend their research time more efficiently and ultimately aiding the attainment of new knowledge. This brief paper gives an overview of our work

Discovery and exploration using musicSpace

Musicologists have to rely upon an extraordinarily heterogeneous body of primary and secondary research sources, even when conducting the most basic exploratory research. Although increasingly available online, data is nevertheless routinely catalogued or stored in numerous discrete databases according to media type (text, image, video, audio) and historical period (contemporary literature/sources, historical literature/sources), yet most musicological research cuts across these artificial divisions; researching Monteverdi’s madrigals, for example, could involve performing essentially the same search several times, because there are several relevant data sources (RISM, Grove, Naxos, RILM, BL Integrated Catalogue and BL Sound Archive). The musicSpace project seeks to integrate access to musicological data sources by providing a single search interface, thereby removing the need for search repetition and reducing inefficiency. The vast increase in on-hand data that comes with database integration both demands and allows for the development of far more sophisticated, intelligent and interactive user interfaces. Accordingly, musicSpace facilitates searching and encourages browsing by displaying search results and parameters using multiple panes, allowing instantaneous paradigmatic shifts in search focus, and employing a detailed subject ontology to enable the semi-automatic construction of complex searches. In this paper we present the musicSpace explorer interface and demonstrate its efficacy. We describe key technologies behind musicSpace to reflect on performance and scalability. In particular, however, we describe how we will be evaluating the system in use for research, and describe our longitudinal study to assess the impact of this integrated approach on artefact discovery and research query support

Homotopy colimits and global observables in Abelian gauge theory

We study chain complexes of field configurations and observables for Abelian gauge theory on contractible manifolds, and show that they can be extended to non-contractible manifolds by using techniques from homotopy theory. The extension prescription yields functors from a category of manifolds to suitable categories of chain complexes. The extended functors properly describe the global field and observable content of Abelian gauge theory, while the original gauge field configurations and observables on contractible manifolds are recovered up to a natural weak equivalence

Decomposition of homogeneous polynomials with low rank

Let $F$ be a homogeneous polynomial of degree $d$ in $m+1$ variables defined over an algebraically closed field of characteristic zero and suppose that $F$ belongs to the $s$-th secant varieties of the standard Veronese variety $X_{m,d}\subset \mathbb{P}^{{m+d\choose d}-1}$ but that its minimal decomposition as a sum of $d$-th powers of linear forms $M_1, ..., M_r$ is $F=M_1^d+... + M_r^d$ with $r>s$. We show that if $s+r\leq 2d+1$ then such a decomposition of $F$ can be split in two parts: one of them is made by linear forms that can be written using only two variables, the other part is uniquely determined once one has fixed the first part. We also obtain a uniqueness theorem for the minimal decomposition of $F$ if the rank is at most $d$ and a mild condition is satisfied.Comment: final version. Math. Z. (to appear