The design and implementation of an infrastructure for multimedia digital libraries

We develop an infrastructure for managing, indexing and serving multimedia content in digital libraries. This infrastructure follows the model of the Web, and thereby is distributed in nature. We discuss the design of the Librarian, the component that manages meta data about the content. The management of meta data has been separated from the media servers that manage the content itself. Also, the extraction of the meta data is largely independent of the Librarian. We introduce our extensible data model and the daemon paradigm that are the core pieces of this architecture. We evaluate our initial implementation using a relational database. We conclude with a discussion of the lessons we learned in building this system, and proposals for improving the flexibility, reliability, and performance of the syste

Sharing learning experiences through correspondence on the WWW

Asynchronous learning networks are facilities and procedures to allow members of learning communities to be more effective and efficient in their learning. One approach is to see how the `sharing' of knowledge can be augmented through meta-data descriptions attached to portfolios and project work. Another approach is to facilitate the reflection upon individual or collaborative learning experiences (Okamoto, Cristea, Matsui, & Miwata, 2000). The position that I defend in this paper is that both the meta-data approach and the attempts to capture the students' meta-knowledge are rather complicated because of social and emotional reason

Remembering Lee Ann in South Africa: Meta-data and reflexive research practice

Lee Ann Fujii and I became fast friends, colleagues, and disciplinary comrades soon after we met at the 2004 Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research (IQMR). IQMR presentations and workshops sparked fourteen years of conversation about the discipline, our positionality with respect to the discipline and research participants, methodologies, the “field,” and much more. Lee Ann made me laugh and encouraged me to think harder as we talked over coffee and chocolate at home in Oakland, New York, Washington, DC, Indianapolis, and Toronto; met up at APSA annual meetings; and practiced yoga together

Reasoning about Social Semantic Web Applications using String Similarity and Frame Logic

Social semantic Web or Web 3.0 application gained major attention from academia and industry in recent times. Such applications try to take advantage of user supplied meta data, using ideas from the semantic Web initiative, in order to provide better services. An open problem is the formalization of such meta data, due to its complex and often inconsistent nature. A possible solution to inconsistencies are string similarity metrics which are explained and analyzed. A study of performance and applicability in a frame logic environment is conducted on the case of agent reasoning about multiple domains in TaOPis - a social semantic Web application for self-organizing communities. Results show that the NYSIIS metric yields surprisingly good results on Croatian words and phrases

The Effectiveness of Personalized Movie Explanations : An Experiment Using Commercial Meta-data

Preprin

Communities and patterns of scientific collaboration

This is the author's accepted version of this article deposited at arXiv (arXiv:1006.1788v2 [physics.soc-ph]) and subsequently published in Scientometrics October 2011, Volume 89, Issue 1, pp 381-396. The final publication is available at link.springer.com http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11192-011-0439-1Author's note: 17 pages. To appear in special edition of Scientometrics. Abstract on arXiv meta-data a shorter version of abstract on actual paper (both in journal and arXiv full paper17 pages. To appear in special edition of Scientometrics. Abstract on arXiv meta-data a shorter version of abstract on actual paper (both in journal and arXiv full paper version)17 pages. To appear in special edition of Scientometrics. Abstract on arXiv meta-data a shorter version of abstract on actual paper (both in journal and arXiv full paper version)17 pages. To appear in special edition of Scientometrics. Abstract on arXiv meta-data a shorter version of abstract on actual paper (both in journal and arXiv full paper version)17 pages. To appear in special edition of Scientometrics. Abstract on arXiv meta-data a shorter version of abstract on actual paper (both in journal and arXiv full paper version)This paper investigates the role of homophily and focus constraint in shaping collaborative scientific research. First, homophily structures collaboration when scientists adhere to a norm of exclusivity in selecting similar partners at a higher rate than dissimilar ones. Two dimensions on which similarity between scientists can be assessed are their research specialties and status positions. Second, focus constraint shapes collaboration when connections among scientists depend on opportunities for social contact. Constraint comes in two forms, depending on whether it originates in institutional or geographic space. Institutional constraint refers to the tendency of scientists to select collaborators within rather than across institutional boundaries. Geographic constraint is the principle that, when collaborations span different institutions, they are more likely to involve scientists that are geographically co-located than dispersed. To study homophily and focus constraint, the paper will argue in favour of an idea of collaboration that moves beyond formal co-authorship to include also other forms of informal intellectual exchange that do not translate into the publication of joint work. A community-detection algorithm is applied to the co-authorship network of the scientists that submitted in Business and Management in the 2001 UK RAE. While results only partially support research-based homophily, they indicate that scientists use status positions for discriminating between potential partners by selecting collaborators from institutions with a rating similar to their own. Strong support is provided in favour of institutional and geographic constraints. Scientists tend to forge intra-institutional collaborations; yet, when they seek collaborators outside their own institutions, they tend to select those who are in geographic proximity

Orchestrating musical (meta)data to better address the real-world search queries of musicologists

The dispersal of musicology’s diverse array of primary and secondary sources across countless libraries and archives was once an enormous obstacle to conducting research, but this has largely been overcome by the digitisation and online publication of resources in recent years. Yet, while the research process has undoubtedly been revolutionised, the current situation is far from perfect, as the digitisation of resources has often been accompanied by their segregation—according to media type, date of publication, subject, language, copyright holder, etc.—into a myriad of discrete online repositories, often with little thought having been given to interoperability. Given that musicological research typically cuts across such artificial divisions, this segregation of data means that accessing basic factual information or running multi-part search queries remains endlessly complicated, needlessly time consuming, and sometimes impossible. This barrier to tractability is only exacerbated by the limited capabilities of currently deployed search interfaces. There is one seemingly obvious solution to this query dilemma: enable integrated real-time querying over all the available metadata from as many sources as possible, and allow users to use that metadata to guide their queries. This solution implies that all data that could feasibly be construed as useful, but which is buried in the records, is extracted in some way, and that there is an interaction approach that enables metadata to be explored effectively and allows for the formulation of rich compound queries. The musicSpace project has taken a dual approach towards realising this solution. At the back-end we are developing services to integrate and, where necessary, surface (meta)data from many of musicology’s most important online resources, including the British Library Music Collections catalogue, the British Library Sound Archive catalogue, Cecilia, Copac, Grove Music Online, Naxos Music Library, Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM), and Répertoire International des Sources Musicale (RISM) UK and Ireland. While at the front-end, in order to optimise the exploration of this integrated dataset, we are developing a modern web-based faceted browsing interface that utilises Semantic Web and Web2.0 technologies such as RDF and AJAX, and which is based on the existing ‘mSpace’ codebase. Our poster outlines the approach we have taken to importing, enriching and integrating the metadata provided by our data partners, and gives examples of the real-world musicological research questions that musicSpace has enabled

The Footprint Database and Web Services of the Herschel Space Observatory

Data from the Herschel Space Observatory is freely available to the public but no uniformly processed catalogue of the observations has been published so far. To date, the Herschel Science Archive does not contain the exact sky coverage (footprint) of individual observations and supports search for measurements based on bounding circles only. Drawing on previous experience in implementing footprint databases, we built the Herschel Footprint Database and Web Services for the Herschel Space Observatory to provide efficient search capabilities for typical astronomical queries. The database was designed with the following main goals in mind: (a) provide a unified data model for meta-data of all instruments and observational modes, (b) quickly find observations covering a selected object and its neighbourhood, (c) quickly find every observation in a larger area of the sky, (d) allow for finding solar system objects crossing observation fields. As a first step, we developed a unified data model of observations of all three Herschel instruments for all pointing and instrument modes. Then, using telescope pointing information and observational meta-data, we compiled a database of footprints. As opposed to methods using pixellation of the sphere, we represent sky coverage in an exact geometric form allowing for precise area calculations. For easier handling of Herschel observation footprints with rather complex shapes, two algorithms were implemented to reduce the outline. Furthermore, a new visualisation tool to plot footprints with various spherical projections was developed. Indexing of the footprints using Hierarchical Triangular Mesh makes it possible to quickly find observations based on sky coverage, time and meta-data. The database is accessible via a web site (http://herschel.vo.elte.hu) and also as a set of REST web service functions.Comment: Accepted for publication in Experimental Astronom