Journal of Digital Information (Texas Digital Library - TDL E-Journals)
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252 research outputs found
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Toward Semantic Digital Libraries: Exploiting Web 2.0 and Semantic Services in Cultural Heritage
No full textDeveloping and maintaining a digital library requires substantial investments that are not simply a matter of technological decisions, but include also organizational issues (user roles, workflows, types of contents, etc.). These issues are often handled by approaches based on a physical perspective that treats the stored information either in terms of data formats or physical space needed to archive them. All these perspectives completely ignore the semantic aspects of the digital contents. In this paper, we address such a semantic perspective. More specifically, we propose a service-oriented architecture that explicitly includes a semantic layer which provides primitive services to the applications built on top of the digital library. As part of this layer, a specific component is described: the PIRATES framework. This module assists end users to complete several tasks concerning the retrieval of the most relevant content with respect to a description of their information needs (a search query, a user profile, etc.). Techniques of user modeling, adaptive personalization, and knowledge representation are exploited to build the PIRATES services in order to fill the gap existing between traditional and semantic digital libraries
Putting Hybrid Cultural Data on the Semantic Web
No full textA prerequisite for joining the rapidly growing Semantic Web is to expose data as RDF triples. In the cultural heritage world the data in question is very often a mixture of structured database fields and associated textual documents. Transforming relational database (RDB) content to RDF is not altogether straightforward and the issues are examined as a preliminary to the much more difficult step of augmenting the RDB content by extracting structured RDF triples directly from natural language text, using a specially designed txt2rdf process. This opens the way to a true integration of the hybrid data so common in heritage management. Finally we lead up to experimental results showing structured queries (using SPARQL) that cannot be answered from the RDB material alone, but which are satisfied against the augmented graph. In this domain there are potentially vast amounts of textual material available for linking to structured records, so the future possibilities of the techniques described are exciting
Shadows In The Cave: hypertext transformations
No full textIt is generally assumed that node-and-link hypertexts are well understood. The implicit links that spatial hypertext creates by proximity and regularity have been less discussed, and that silence suggests that we believe them also to be adequately described, and that opportunities for innovation and research primarily lie in newer and less explored areas. Yet fairly straightforward and conventional extensions of familiar hypertext links and spatial hypertexts reveal unexpected kinds of connection structure that is implicit (and unrepresented) in the interface and tacit (and unstudied) in the literature. Details of implementation and context can create opportunities for unexpected forms of hypertextual relations that seem quite as unfamiliar as systems intentionally designed for their novelty
Tagging, Sharing and the Influence of Personal Experience
No full textSocial bookmarking or tagging is the process of assigning and sharing among users, freely selected terms to resources. This approach is a form of user-generated metadata and allows users to locate new resources through the collective intelligence of other users. Social tagging offers a new avenue for resource discovery as compared to taxonomies and subject directories created by experts. While social tagging has its advantages, one possible drawback is that tag creators, who come with different preferences, experiences, and beliefs, among other factors, may view the same document differently and therefore apply different tags even though they may have the same goal of content organization and sharing. In this paper, we argue that familiarity is an important issue to be investigated in social tagging systems, and our goal is to examine the influence of the level of familiarity with social tagging on the effectiveness of tags for content sharing. We found that high familiarity with the concept of tagging, Web directories, and social tagging systems are significantly and positively associated with high tag effectiveness for content sharing. Implications of our findings and opportunities for future work are discussed
Special Issue on Information Access to Cultural Heritage
No full textThis special issue grew out of the Workshop on Information Access to Cultural
Heritage, which was held in conjunction with the European Conference on Digital
Libraries (ECDL) in Aarhus, Denmark in late 2008. The workshop brought together
researchers in the area of information access technology and practitioners working
in the cultural heritage field to consider the new ways in which technological
developments can promote and support access to cultural heritage content
Designing Personal Information Management Systems for Creative Practitioners
No full textThis paper first explores information management by creative practitioners through a review of research related to the area. Two studies are then used to explore this area from different viewpoints. Topics of interest include the types of information that are commonly managed, the reasons for creating representations, the processes of finding and interacting with materials and the tools used. This understanding is then applied and extended through the design and evaluation of an application inspired by the common use of scrapbooks by practitioners. Creative practice generally involves the retention, development and communication of ideas, inspirational materials and structures of associations represented in a range of media over long periods of time. Extensive variations in behaviours between individuals are seen as a natural part of creative processes. Through the studies and the example of the Associative Scrapbook, we argue that support for PIM in creative practice should integrate work on specific task instances with the long-term collection and reuse of information related to the practitioners’ interests. Whilst there are needs that are specific for particular types of creative tasks, the studies and initial evaluations of the prototype provide evidence to suggest that creative PIM needs and processes show similarities across domains
Lost in social space: Information retrieval issues in Web 1.5
No full textThis paper is concerned with the application of Web 2.0 technologies within a conventional institutional learning setting. After considering the affordances of Web 2.0 technologies vs Web 1.0 technologies and a framework for viewing social software in terms of groups, networks and collectives, we describe an instance of trying to use Elgg, a rich social application, to support a distance-taught course within a conventional face-to-face university. A number of issues are identified, some of which are related to Elgg’s interface but the biggest of which relate to the tensions between top-down and bottom-up control and the shifting contexts of personal, group, network and collective modes of engagement. These problems suggest that, in their current form, social technologies pose intractable difficulties in information organisation and retrieval when used for formal learning. We propose a range of solutions that make use of the wisdom of the crowd combined with human intervention. This paper addresses and extends themes explored in SIRTEL 07
Exploratory Analysis of the Main Characteristics of Tags and Tagging of Educational Resources in a Multi-lingual Context
No full textAlthough social, collaborative classification through tagging has been the focus of recent research, the effect of multi-linguality is often overlooked. This work presents an exploratory study of the production and use of tags in multiple languages in a context of European Learning Resources Exchange. We describe a tagging tool used by teachers from 6 countries and study the main characteristics of tags and how users tag when multiple languages are presented. We find early indication that tags and bookmarks could be used to facilitate the discovery of educational resources across country and language borders. “Hiding all but the right tags” becomes crucial for the success of a multi-lingual collaborative tagging system
Towards Affordable Disclosure of Spoken Heritage Archives
No full textThis paper presents and discusses ongoing work aiming at affordable disclosure of real-world spoken heritage archives in general, and in particular of a collection of recorded interviews with Dutch survivors of World War II concentration camp Buchenwald. Given such collections, we at least want to provide search at different levels and a flexible way of presenting results. Strategies for automatic annotation based on speech recognition - supporting e.g., within-document search - are outlined and discussed with respect to the Buchenwald interview collection. In addition, usability aspects of the spoken word search are discussed on the basis of our experiences with the online Buchenwald web portal. It is concluded that, although user feedback is generally fairly positive, automatic annotation performance is not yet satisfactory, and requires additional research
CONDITOR1: Topic Maps and DITA labelling tool for textual documents with historical information
No full textConditor is a software tool which works with textual documents containing historical information. The purpose of this work two-fold: firstly to show the validity of the developed engine to correctly identify and label the entities of the universe of discourse with a labelled-combined XTM-DITA model. Secondly to explain the improvements achieved in the information retrieval process thanks to the use of a object-oriented database (JPOX) as well as its integration into the Lucene-type database search process to not only accomplish more accurate searches, but to also help the future development of a recommender system [21]. We finish with a brief demo in a 3D-graph of the results of the aforementioned search