Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Service Oriented Computing [1] is consolidating as the dominant paradigm for software development of this decade. The support it has received from researchers, practitioners and –most important –the software industry demonstrates the suitability of this approach. This means that current software systems must evolve in this direction in order to keep aligned with technology, providing a set of services that can be invoked by programs instead of end users.

The estimate of web-content production costs is a very difficult task. It is difficult to make exact predictions due to the great quantity of unknown factors. However, digitization projects need to have a precise idea of the economic costs and times involved in the development of their contents. As it happens with software development projects, incorrect estimates give way to delays and costs overdrafts. Based on methods used in Software Engineering for software development cost prediction like COCOMO [1]) and Function Points [2], and using historical data gathered during five years of work at the Miguel de Cervantes Digital Library, where more than 12.000 books were digitized, we have refined an equation for digitization cost estimates named DiCoMo (Digitization Cost Model). This method can be adapted to different production processes, like the production of digital XML or HTML texts using scanning plus OCR and human proofreading, or the production of digital facsimiles (scanning images without OCR). The estimates done a priori are improved as the project evolves by means of adjustments based on real data obtained from previous stages of the production process. Each estimate is a refinement obtained as a result of the work done so far.

There is growing trend towards academic and research organizations to establish OAI-compliant institutional repositories. ePrints@IISc (http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in/) is the institutional repository of Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. Though the repository is growing steadily, mediated submission by the ePrints@IISc staff is the predominant mode of enriching the repository. We have been exploring viable means of getting our researchers to contribute more actively to the repository. Observations have recently been made as to why researchers might be reluctant to contribute to central repositories [1]. It has been suggested that it might be useful to provide researchers with tools to easily create and share Personal Digital Repositories (PDR) designed to organize and facilitate their research and learning agendas. The collection in the PDR is built and managed by the scholar based on individual needs. A network of such PDRs could form the basis for a bottom up, organic approach to enrich centralized institutional repositories.

China is a country with an ancient civilization going back 5,000 years. Keeping records on inscriptions is an important method of preserving the memory of Chinese history and culture. Rubbings are important components of ancient Chinese books, and are the main source for people to learn, study, and research history. The construction of a Chinese rubbings digital library is an attempt to solve the problems of preserving and utilizing cultural heritage materials. This poster will discuss the following topics: (1) technical process of constructing a Chinese rubbings digital library; (2) formulating principles and designing metadata standards for the Chinese rubbings digital library; (3) introduction of four prototype databases; and (4) analysis of existing problems in building a rubbings digital library such as data capacity, system functions, metadata standards, and international cooperation.

The access and reproduction policies of the digital collections of fifteen leading academic and national digital libraries worldwide are classified according to factors such as the creation type of the material, acquisition method and copyright ownership. The relationship of these factors and policies is analyzed and quantitative remarks are extracted. We propose a policy model for the digital content of the national and academic libraries. The model consists of rules, supplemented by their exceptions, about which factors lead to specific policies. We derive new policy rules on access and reproduction when different copyright terms are applied. We conclude with findings on policies. Finally, we compare national and academic library policies, showing interesting results that arise on their similarities and differences.

Daffodil is a front-end to federated, heterogeneous digital libraries targeting at strategic support of users during the information seeking process by offering a variety of functions for searching, exploring and managing digital library objects. In the process of searching for information, common strategies and tactics emerge that can be reused in different searches and different contexts. This poster presents the framework that will be used to build a search support system that provides the possibilities to define and recognize such common strategies and tactics, to save and reuse them, to build larger search plans from these parts, and to support automatic execution of partial or complete search strategies.

When searching metadata, it can be useful to detect expressions in the query that should be searched for in specific fields (for instance, person names might correspond to an “author” field). In [1], it was shown that automatically structured queries (matching title, abstract, author and publication fields) improved effectiveness when searching the ACM, CITIDEL and NDLTD Computing Digital Libraries.

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) is making feasible to build high level services such as a federated search service that harvests metadata from different data providers using the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting (OAI-PMH) and provides a unified search interface. There are numerous challenges to build and maintain a federation service, and one of them is managing duplicates. Detecting exact duplicates where two records have identical set of metadata fields is straight-forward. The problem arises when two or more records differ slightly due to data entry errors, for example. Many duplicate detection algorithms exist, but are computationally intensive for large federated digital library. In this paper, we propose an efficient duplication detection algorithm for a large federated digital library like Arc.

This poster draws on the ‘Digital Libraries in Support of Innovative Approaches to Learning and Teaching in Geography’ (http://www.dialogplus.org) project under which geography teachers in two UK and two US universities are collaborating in the creation and sharing of reusable online learning activities. A specific aim of the project has been to explore the use of digital library (DL) infrastructures to enable the sharing of learning objects between the participating institutions. This poster presents a brief overview of the broader project, but focuses on one case study drawn from our programme of work, whereby a learning activity or ‘nugget’ concerned with academic integrity, originally developed at Pennsylvania State University (PSU) in the USA for use by distance learning masters students, has subsequently been repurposed for campus based students at the Universities of Southampton and Leeds in the UK.

Conference Management constitutes a field in Digital Libraries including tasks such as paper to reviewer assignment and session compilation. These tasks depend on the paper to topic assignment. TCeReview addresses the automatic organization of text documents and enhances conventional conference management applications by incorporating a text classification module. This paper presents the results obtained during the empirical evaluation of the TCeReview applied at ECDL’05.