Applied Information Technology opens Virtual Platform for the Legacy of Alexander von Humboldt

The Humboldt Digital Library (HDL) is a project that aims to provide digital access to the legacy of Alexander von Humboldt. The HDL runs on an open source library developed in the Hochschule Offenburg and provides a virtual research environment in which researchers can work more effectively. This article presents the development made in the HDL to provide alternative ways of content dissemination through the OAI protocol.Through the implemtantion of the OAI-PMH data provider in the HDL, the library is accessibly in many universities and research centers everywhere around the globe

Semantic representation of provenance and contextual information in scientific research

Semantic-Representation-Provenance-Contextual-Information-Scientific-Research Die Computer- und Informationstechnologie ist eine der größten Errungenschaften des letzten Jahrhunderts -- eine Revolution, welche die Art und Weise beeinflusst, auf die wir im täglichen Leben auf technische und soziale Problemen reagieren. Obwohl diese Technologien bereits Forschungsaktivitäten an sich beeinflussen, so ist zu erwarten, dass sie auch einen Einfluss auf das Publizieren und Teilen von Forschungsergebnissen haben werden. Bisher wurden in wissenschaftlichen Publikationen nur in geringem Maße Daten beigefügt. Forschungförderungseinrichtungen drängen zu konkreten Lösungen zum Verbreiten, Teilen und Wiederverwenden von Forschungsergebnissen. Berichte wie “Riding the Wave - How Europe can gain from the rising tide of scientific data” der High Level Expert Group on Scientific Data der Europäischen Kommission zeichnen eine Vision, bei der die Herausforderungen einer Diversität an Datenformaten, Menschen und Gemeinschaften durch die Anwendung technischer, semantischer und sozialer Eigenschaften der Interoperabilität vermieden werden. Diese Forschung adressiert derartige Herausforderungen aus einer technischer Perspektive. Fokus dieser Arbeit ist die Exploration eines neuartigen Ansatzes zur Unterstützung der Kuration (Sichtung und Korrektur) von Forschungsdaten mittels der Entwicklung einer Methodologie und mittels der Definition eines automatischen Datenkurationsprozesses in welchem Daten auf einfache Weise annotiert werden können. Ein Beitrag besteht in einem formalen Modell (COSI), welches die Integration großer Mengen an Metadaten erlaubt, welche als logische Konzepte behandelt werden können anstatt nur als Literale. Diese Konzepte werden in einer Ontologie definiert, welche, unter anderem, Inferenzen und Schlussfolgerungen ermöglicht. Der zweite Beitrag dieser Arbeit besteht in einer pragmatischen Lösung die es erlaubt, Metadaten on-the-fly zu annotieren.Computational and information technology is one of the biggest advancement of the last century, a revolution that is influencing the way we approach social and technical problems in our day to day life. While these technologies have already influenced the research activity per sé, it is to be expected that these innovations will significantly influence the publishing and sharing of scientific results as well. So far, scientific publications have relied on limited result data attached inline in research paper publications. Establishments supporting research are pushing for concrete solutions that allow dissemination, share and reuse of research results. Reports such as “Riding the Wave - How Europe can gain from the rising tide of scientific data” of the High Level Expert Group on Scientific Data, European Commission (High Level Expert Group on Scientific Data, October 2010) presents a vision where the challenges of diverse data formats, people and communities are avoided due to the application of technical, semantic and social features of interoperability. This research is an effort to address similar concerns from a technical perspective. Focus of this research is the exploration of a novel approach on supporting research data curation by developing a method and defining an automated data curation process where data can be easily annotated. As a contribution, this work offers a formal model (COSI) that allows integration of plentiful metadata that can be treated as logic concepts and not merely as literals. These concepts are defined in an ontology that allows among other actions, inference and reasoning operations. The second contribution of this work is associated to a pragmatic solution that facilitates annotation of metadata on the fly. This solution is referred as sheer curation and shows how data can be annotated (based on COSI) and published while investigations are executed

Virtual Research Environment in the Digital Library of Alexander Humboldt

After approximately 200 years, a comprehensive access to the texts of Humboldt’s extraordinary exploration of the Americans is within sight. To open the legacy to the public for free access the Humboldt Digital Library (HDL) project has been developing a dynamic amount of data related to studies of Alexander von Humboldt. The library includes a range of texts, tables and images, as well as many tools that assist mining the data and navigating the system

Core Ontology for Scientific Investigations

<p>COSI, a formal ontology recommended to be used as an information model for the preservation, mediation and interchange of research data gathered during the execution of scientific investigations</p

Toporaz 3D

A 3D representation of Nuremberg<br

Vocabulary of Scientific Disciplines

<div>Vocabulary based on DFG'S Classification of Subject Area, Review Board, Research Area and Scientific Discipline (2016 - 2019) <br></div

Information Management beyond Digital Libraries: Alexander von Humboldt in the Web

After approximately 200 years, a comprehensive access to the texts of Humboldt's extraordinary exploration of the Americans is within sight. To open the legacy to the public for free access the Humboldt Digital Library (HDL) Project has been developing a dynamic amount of data related to studies of Alexander von Humboldt. The Library includes a range of texts, tables and images, as well as many tools that assist mining the data and navigating the system. The HDL aims to provide an environment in which researchers can work more effectively with a wider variety of primary source materialsùtextual as well as visual. Moreover, the greatest advantage of this dynamic system is its capability to connect data from diverse locations in Humboldt's twenty-nine volumes and allow comparison with modern scientific knowledge and developments. HDL can recreate the context of a particular text, making it possible to view images, geo-referenced and interactive maps, information about plants and animals, as well as scientific data relevant to Humboldt's observations. By introducing Web 2.0 technology implementations, we are providing new visualizations of the information published in this Digital Library. The perception of the Information Architecture is changing in the era of Web 2.0. By providing more search facilities, creating an academic network around our library and implementing new ways of multi-dimensional navigation we argue that Information Architecture can be extended to new methods of information representation. Facilitating the user navigation to the required information will always be an aim for the managers of high volume data systems. This can be achieved by implementing Information Retrieval modules based on user profiling and by improving the visualization features

Behavior-Based Information Seeking in Digital Libraries. Search Optimization in the Humboldt Digital Library

Digital libraries are providing an increasing amount of data, which is normally structured in a classical way by documents and described by metadata as keywords. The data, even in scientific systems such as digital libraries and virtual research environments, will contain a great amount of noise or information unnecessary for our personal interests. Although there has been a lot of progress in the field of information retrieval, search techniques and other content finding methods, there is still much to be done in the field of information retrieval based on user behavior. This paper presents an approach deployed in the Humboldt Digital Library (HDL) to facilitate the retrieval of relevant information to the users of the system, making recommendations of paragraphs based on their profile and the behavior of other users who share similar profiles. The Humboldt digital library represents an innovative system of open access to the legacy of Alexander von Humboldt in a digital form on the Internet (www.avhumboldt.net). It contributes to the key question, how to present interconnected data in a proper form using information technologies

Dataset used in Defining Digital Libraries

<p>This dataset is part of a research paper on the definition of digital libraries. <br>Even though we claim that this list provides an exhaustive coverage of works that contain definitions of digital library, we are aware that potentially there can be other definitions which could be appended.</p