Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Requirements gathering and conceptual modeling are essential for the customization of digital libraries (DLs), to help attend the needs of target communities. In this paper, we show how to apply the 5S (Streams, Structures, Spaces, Scenarios, and Societies) formal framework to support both tasks. The intuitive nature of the framework allows for easy and systematic requirements analysis, while its formal nature ensures the precision and correctness required for semi-automatic DL generation. Further, we show how 5S can help us define a domain-specific DL metamodel in the field of archaeology. Finally, an archaeological DL case study (from the ETANA project) yields informal and formal descriptions of two DL models (instances of the metamodel).

This paper elaborates on the design and development of an effective digital object manipulation mechanism that facilitates the generation of configurable Digital Library application logic, as expressed by collection manager, cataloguing and browsing modules. Our work aims to resolve the issue that digital objects typing information can be currently utilized only by humans as a guide and not by programs as a digital object type conformance mechanism. Drawing on the notions of the Object Oriented Model, we propose a “type checking” mechanism that automates the conformance of digital objects to their type definitions, named digital object prototypes . We pinpoint the practical benefits gained by our approach in the development of the University of Athens Digital Library, in terms of code reuse and configuration capabilities.

We present a digital library architecture based on distributed hash tables. We discuss the main components of this architecture and the protocols for offering information retrieval and information filtering functionality. We present an experimental evaluation of our proposals.

As digital music collections grow, so does the need to organizing them automatically. In this paper we present an approach to hierarchically organize music collections at the artist level. Artists are grouped according to similarity which is computed using a web search engine and standard text retrieval techniques. The groups are described by words found on the webpages using term selection techniques and domain knowledge. We compare different term selection techniques, present a simple demonstration, and discuss our findings.

The scientific research on accessing and retrieval of music documents is becoming increasingly active, including the analysis of suitable features for content description or the development of algorithms to match relevant documents with queries. One of the challenges in this area is the possibility to extend textual retrieval techniques to music language. Music lacks of explicit separators between its lexical units, thus they have to be automatically extracted. This paper presents an overview of different approaches to melody segmentation aimed at extracting music lexical units. A comparison of different approaches is presented, showing their impact on indexes size and on retrieval effectiveness.

This paper reports the results of a user-centered experiment which examined the effect of parallel multi-database searching using automated collection fusion strategies on information seeking performance. Three conditions were tested in the experiment. Subjects in the first condition performed search tasks in a WWW-based distributed hypermedia digital library which did not support parallel, concurrent searching of multiple collections, and did not offer any automated mechanism for source selection. Subjects in the second and the third conditions performed parallel multi-database search tasks in the same library with the support of two automated collection fusion strategies (uniform and link-based), each solving the collection fusion problem using a different approach. The results show that information-seeking performance tends to be positively affected when the eclectic link-based method was used. On the other hand, the uniform collection fusion method which treats all the sub-collections in the same manner, does not present any benefit in comparison to information seeking environments in which users must manually select sources and parallel multi-database searching is not provided.

XML is becoming the standard representation format for metadata. Metadata for multimedia documents, as for instance MPEG-7, require approximate match search functionalities to be supported in addition to exact match search. As an example, consider image search performed by using MPEG-7 visual descriptors. It does not make sense to search for images that are exactly equal to a query image. Rather, images similar to a query image are more likely to be searched. We present the architecture of an XML search engine where special techniques are used to integrate approximate and exact match search functionalities.

The increase in the amount of data available in digital libraries calls for the development of search engines that allow the users to find quickly and effectively what they are looking for. The XML tagging makes possible the addition of structural information in digitized content. These metadata offer new opportunities to a wide variety of new services. This paper describes the requirements that a search engine inside a digital library should fulfill and it also presents a specific XML search engine architecture. This architecture is designed to index a large amount of text with structural tagging and to be web-available. The architecture has been developed and successfully tested at the Miguel de Cervantes Digital Library.

We present an integrated framework for the document conversion from legacy formats to XML format. We describe the LegDoC project, aimed at automating the conversion of layout annotations layout-oriented formats like PDF, PS and HTML to semantic-oriented annotations. A toolkit of different components covers complementary techniques the logical document analysis and semantic annotations with the methods of machine learning. We use a real case conversion project as a driving example to exemplify different techniques implemented in the project.

One of the objectives of the Open Access movement is to establish institutional repositories at universities and other research institutions in order to support self-archiving. Although a lot of software solutions have already been presented in recent years they lack a seamless integration of authoring tools, support for authors, and other technical publication tools. This paper presents a formal approach to describe software components applied in publishing processes. Additionally it is depicted how this formal description leads to the technological basis for SCOPE (Service Core for Open Publishing Environments) – a publishing platform for XML based publishing models. SCOPE is a framework intended for the integration of different publication components into a single platform.