Journal of Digital Information (Texas Digital Library - TDL E-Journals)
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252 research outputs found
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Hypermedia and the Semantic Web: A Research Agenda
No full textUntil recently, the Semantic Web was little more than a name for the next-generation Web infrastructure as envisioned by its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. With the introduction of XML and RDF, and new developments such as RDF Schema and DAML+OIL, the Semantic Web is rapidly taking shape. This paper gives an overview of the state-of-the-art in Semantic Web technology, the key relationships with traditional hypermedia research, and a comprehensive reference list to various sets of literature (hypertext, Web and Semantic Web). A research agenda describes the open research issues in the development of the Semantic Web from the perspective of hypermedia research
Scholarly Associations and the Economic Viability of Open Access Publishing
No full textThe paper considers a number of economic issues that scholarly associations are confronting in moving their journals online, with a focus on the possible viability of an open access or free-to-read format. It explores the current content overlap between subscription-based and open access sources, and considers how these redundancies favor open access publishing and indexing. It utilizes the tax returns for 20 US non-profit scholarly associations to analyze current publishing revenues against costs, arguing that the associations could make up the loss of revenue posed by the open access publishing model through cost savings and other revenue sources, while serving their membership better through the increased readership in an era of declining subscriptions. While the decision to publish journals in an open access format is by no means simply an economic one, the viability of open access publishing warrants serious consideration by scholarly associations that are currently determining what this new medium may mean for the circulation of knowledge
Supporting Community Inquiry with Digital Resources
No full textToday there are a number of fields that address the need to develop better means of employing information and communication technologies (ICTs) to help communities achieve their goals. Digital infrastructure and repositories are widely created to support the activities of educational, workplace, and scientific communities, as well as virtual communities of interest that may center on topics as diverse as entertainment, crisis management, and health. However, the research and development of ICTs faces numerous challenges. Community inquiry theory can help address some of these challenges. The Inquiry Page project supports a set of ICTs that have been developed by a community of inquiry in order to support communities of inquiry. The paper presents the theory of community inquiry and illustrates how inquiry theory can influence the research and development of ICTs and their adoption and use within real communities
The Use of Visual Artifacts in the User-Informed Development of an Educational Digital Library Collection
No full textDigital libraries are complex sociotechnical artifacts. As such they will be understood and treated in different ways by the different groups that interact with them. The different understandings of these groups will be rooted in the differing tacit, underlying \u27technological frames\u27 that they will have of digital libraries as technologies. In cases where developers and users are both involved in the development of digital library collections, and where the frames of developers and users differ significantly, this can result in difficulties in the collection development process. It is important, therefore, to acknowledge that such differences can exist between developers and users, and to find ways to identify, describe, and mediate them. The paper describes the case of the Digital Water Education Library (DWEL). DWEL was an example of community-led collections development, in which users - in this case educators - were involved in the design and development of its collection. An ethnographic and communications-based analysis of DWEL\u27s organizational communication revealed the existence of different technological frames among the developers and the users of DWEL, differences which impeded the progress of the project. These differences were exacerbated by the project\u27s distributed organizational structure and reliance on network communication technologies for the bulk of its organizational communication. The paper describes how these differences were mediated, in part through the sharing of \u27boundary objects\u27 - graphic representations of the project\u27s structures and processes - among the developers and users, and how these representations subsequently informed the development of an online tool that represented some of the developers\u27 knowledge to the users
Finding Murphy Brown: How Accessible are Historic Television Broadcasts?
No full textThis article presents the results of a project completed in May, 2005 at the University of California, Berkeley to measure the accessibility of historic television broadcasts. The first section describes a model of the accessibility of news and entertainment broadcasts, and the second section applies this model in an attempted reconstruction of the interaction on television between then-Vice President Dan Quayle and the fictional character Murphy Brown. The final section compares the results with the ruling in Encyclopaedia Britannica Educational Corp. v. Crooks, 542 F. Supp. 1156 (W.D.N.Y. 1982), which has restricted the sharing of video broadcasts recorded off the air for academic use, and offers some suggestions for future research
Augmenting Thesaurus Relationships: Possibilities for Retrieval
No full textThis paper discusses issues concerning the augmentation of thesaurus relationships, in light of new application possibilities for retrieval. We first discuss a case study that explored the retrieval potential of an augmented set of thesaurus relationships by specialising standard relationships into richer subtypes, in particular hierarchical geographical containment and the associative relationship. We then locate this work in a broader context by reviewing various attempts to build taxonomies of thesaurus relationships, and conclude by discussing the feasibility of hierarchically augmenting the core set of thesaurus relationships, particularly the associative relationship. We discuss the possibility of enriching the specification and semantics of Related Term (RT relationships), while maintaining compatibility with traditional thesauri via a limited hierarchical extension of the associative (and hierarchical) relationships. This would be facilitated by distinguishing the type of term from the (sub)type of relationship and explicitly specifying semantic categories for terms following a faceted approach.
We first illustrate how hierarchical spatial relationships can be used to provide more flexible retrieval for queries incorporating place names in applications employing online gazetteers and geographical thesauri. We then employ a set of experimental scenarios to investigate key issues affecting use of the associative (RT) thesaurus relationships in semantic distance measures. Previous work has noted the potential of RTs in thesaurus search aids but also the problem of uncontrolled expansion of query term sets. Results presented in this paper suggest the potential for taking account of the hierarchical context of an RT link and specialisations of the RT relationship
Café Jus: an Electronic Journals User Survey
No full textDuring 1996, the number of scholarly periodicals available in electronic form increased rapidly. The Café Jus project took advantage of this critical mass of electronic journals to mount a major user study with taught postgraduate students, research students and staff in various disciplines at Loughborough University. The main conclusions were that low-level technical problems are still a deterrent to the use of electronic journals; that people prefer not to read at length on screen, but printing out is slow; that commercial publishers tend to follow the lead of technology rather than consider the convenience of their users; that at present there is a significant need for user training, exacerbated by the variety of publishers\u27 interfaces and their speed of change; and that free journals using HTML are preferred to commercial journals using PDF for convenience of reading, but they are likely to be regarded as of lower academic quality. The implications of these results for publishers and for the future of electronic journals are discussed
Efficiency Considerations for Scalable Information Retrieval Servers
No full textWe review a variety of techniques to improve efficiency in information retrieval. Given the increasing volumes of data that are available electronically, understanding and using such techniques is critical.
We address several efficiency concerns, but our primary focus is on index processing since it dominates the computational demands of information retrieval. Given the importance of index processing, in addition to a general overview we include some recent index maintenance results. These results demonstrate that by delaying the updating of the index when additional documents are introduced to the collection, efficiency is improved without noticeably degrading the effectiveness of information retrieval.
We conclude with an overview of parallel processing in information retrieval. Since users cannot tolerate lengthy response times, searching large text databases requires vast computational resources. Parallel processing is currently the only means to support these demands. We focus on only those approaches that are currently commercially viable
Having the Right Connections: the LIMBER Project
No full textAs with any journey, you have to make the right connections if you want to reach your desired destination. The goal in the LIMBER project is to facilitate cross-European data analysis independent of domain, resource, language and vocabulary. The paper describes the expertise, associations, standards and architecture underlying the project deliverables designed to achieve the project\u27s ambitious aims
Author-generated Dublin Core Metadata for Web Resources: A Baseline Study in an Organization
No full textThis paper reports on a study that examined the ability of resource authors to create acceptable metadata in an organizational setting. The results indicate that authors can create good quality metadata when working with the Dublin Core, and in some cases they may be able to create metadata that is of better quality than a metadata professional can produce. This research suggests that authors think metadata is valuable for resource discovery, that it should be created for Web resources, and that they, as authors, should be involved in metadata production for their works. The study also indicates that a simple Web form, with textual guidance and selective use of features (e.g. pop-up windows, drop-down menus, etc.) can assist authors in generating good quality metadata