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THE PROBLEMS OF DESKTOP INDEXING OF A BOOK TRANSLATED INTO A NON-ROMAN SCRIPT: DESCRIPTION OF A REAL EXPERIENCE
No full textZarnegar (gold writer) is a word processor widely used by publishers of both scholarly journals and books in Iran. Although it is gradually substituted by Word for Windows that is much more powerful than Zarnegar, the process seems to be slow and most Iranian publishers still prefer to receive manuscripts in Zarnegar than Word. There are many reasons for this preference: Word, though having many great features such as compatibility with other Windows applications and especially with Word Wide Web (WWW) is poor in terms of Farsi, the official language of Iran. The main reason for this poorness is that Farsi versions of Word are in fact Arabic versions. Zarnegar has been developed by Iranians familiar with Farsi script and acts more conveniently than Word in Farsi writing. The fonts employed in Zarnegar are mostly Farsi and seem to be more beautiful than Word due to the tradition of calligraphy among Iranians. Some fonts in Word employ Arabic letters that are not used in Farsi. This feature is of much dislike between Iranians using it. The author, when finished translating an English book into Farsi, confronted some problems when trying to prepare the index to the book. When providing an index to a translated book, the logical criterion to select the entries of the translated index is to base them on the entries of the original language index. Therefore, the entries of the original index were translated, and then rearranged in Farsi alphabet in another file When the task of allocating the page numbers to Farsi entries began by using the ?Find? option under the ?Edit? menu in Zarnegar, the different equivalents selected in each chapter for a single concept and not found totally by searching under the same term, showed up as the first major problem. The second major problem encountered was the similarity between the concepts used both in a very specific sense as well a general sense. The latter increased irrationally the number of pages containing some entries. Since the book translated was on the theoretical as well as practical aspects of library services, the word ?use? was an example of problems caused by the similarity of words that have both specific and general meanings in library and information science context. Some suggestions are provided in the article as to how to start the task of translating the book by first translating the index into Farsi, providing an English-Farsi dictionary as well as a Farsi-English one for frequent reference to them in order to find selected equivalents, how to allocate page numbers while using the Farsi-English dictionary to provide the final Farsi index and how to overcome the problems mentioned above
ADRIAN: E-LEARNING CONTENT PRODUCTION (CREATING ONLINE EXAMS)
No full textUniversities and other institutions related to education are investing time and resources in E-learning initiatives. This leads to an increasing number of course offers in E-learning format. There are environments, called Learning Management Systems (LMS), designed to help teachers in the management of their courses. Basically a LMS provides functionalities to manage student records, to facilitate communication between students and between students and teacher, to control accesses and produce statistics, schedules, evaluation and an open platform to help teachers make lecture content available online. However they do not dictate what kind of technology or format should be used to prepare those contents. Although this issue can be seen as an advantage in certain contexts it leads to a format anarchy and makes support for content production impossible. Here is where ADRIAN comes into the scene providing support for content production. ADRIAN is composed by several components: one component to help producing lessons and lab guided sessions; one component for the production of tests and exams; one component to support the production of multimedia presentations; and one component to generate interfaces that integrate all the material produced (content parts) by the other components or developed elsewhere by the teacher. The whole system is being developed with XML (eXtended Markup Language) using descriptive markup for content, and related technologies like XSL (eXtended Stylesheet Language) for content transformations. This way we ensure the portability and platform independence of the system. The last mentioned component, the integration component, is based on ontologies; the user is asked to define an ontology for his course. After that the system generates automatically the web interface that integrates all the courseware components. We start by describing the ADRIAN architecture (a more detailed description was published at M-ISCTE conference) and then we present the Tests and Exams Production application. The main idea behind Tests an Exams is that structure is not free. This ADRIAN?s component enforces a specific structure specified in an XML Schema. This is the way to achieve normalization in the content production. However to convince teachers to use we provide all the editing and transformation tools. The user only has to use an interface to introduce content. After that the system takes care of the electronic publishing: producing paper and web versions and in this case (tests and exams) managing the interaction between students solving the online exam and the system. In this paper we characterize the different kinds of exams and present the steps towards the XML Schema definition. Then we describe this application lifecycle and the implementation we have
Linking knowledge in an open access environment: the promises of the sematic web
No full textOpen Access, the movement to make scholarly and scientific information openly available, has become a prominent idea in recent years, spawning efforts to revise the publishing industry and to establish public archives of research material. In 1937 the English scholar H G Wells (best known for his science fiction stories like The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine) declared that there was no practical obstacle to the formation of a collection of the whole world?s published knowledge in microfilm to render it universally accessible. Less than a decade later Vannevar Bush (Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, USA) proposed a similar system that would help researchers to capitalise on such universal access by adding mechanisms that would later come to inspire hypertext links. Neither proposal was developed into a product, but they demonstrate the drive for Open Access on a global scope stretching back over sixty years, predating not just the World Wide Web and the Internet but the digital computer as well. They expose the maturity of the need for a system to augment the publishing process and its familiar artefacts to assist scientists and to make their work more effective. The accepted role of scientific and scholarly publication is to record research activity in a timely fashion, keeping others in the research community up-to-date with current developments. Until very recently, it has been the case that printed journals were the most efficient method for the dissemination and archival of research results. Technical advances in the past two decades have allowed the process of scholarly communication to take other forms, particularly in the dissemination of articles via the World Wide Web. The scientific process critically depends on dissemination ? on the exposure of the work to other scientists who can validate, replicate and build on the work as it has been communicated in a research article. Access to these articles (representing the work of other scientists) is important to me because it informs the work that I wish to undertake. Conversely, my access to the other scientists? work is important to them because it signifies the impact of their work (as eventually evidenced by a citation of their article). Hence improving access (the objective of the Open Access movement) inevitably improves impact ? the observed influence of the work (the basis of a scientist?s promotion and career advancement) and ultimately the advancement of science. The effect of facilitating access does not end with scientists reading more; providing open access to scientific information allows new kinds of interaction and engagement with the literature. At their most basic, services can collect and aggregate the literature providing global access. By examining the full texts they can provide search engines and undertake categorisation and classification. More sophisticated services extract citations from each article to enable ranking and co-citation community mapping
?Intelligent newspaper? with ?MyCover?
No full textIn this presentation are explained, the reasons (increase the users subscribed to a newspaper), the definition of the road to be followed (personalisation of content), the means to achieve this with a print newspaper (use of PDFs on the Web), the technical processes involved (documentary, relational and PDF repository data bases), and the important marketing data obtained along the lines of ?marketing-driven journalism?
A Digital Library for ELPUB Proceedings: The Use of a Web-Based Prototype
No full textThis paper presents the initial steps in the creation of a digital library of previous ELPUB proceedings. The series of ELPUB conferences started in 1997, but due to different reasons the proceedings appeared solely in a paper-based format. Six conferences on electronic publishing resulted in an interesting output of scientific papers and it makes sense to have thiswider and easier available to the audience. The currently used interface of the ELPUB Digital Library was created in the framework of an EU-IST project, called SciX (Open Scientific Exchange of Information). First results on the gathering of initial content will be presented as well as related experiences. Furthermore other DL-prototypes - which were also developedin the context of the SciX-project - will be described as examples of interest. Finally, thoughts on future developments of the ELPUB Digital Library will be displayed
User-Centred Design of a Web Interface for a Bibliographic Database on Women?s Health
No full textWeb usability design guidelines derived from a synthesis of the literature were used to evaluate two Web search interfaces for a bibliographic database on women?s health information resources. The current interface is hosted on the Ontario Women?s Health Council Secretariat website (OWHC). The OWHC is an agency of the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care (Ontario, Canada). The new interface will be hosted on the Resources section of the Women?s Health Matters (WHM) website, a bilingual Canadian consumer health portal on women?s health issues. Six criteria for effective web interface design were identified: visual design; information architecture; navigation; search; universal usability, and help. Prior to conducting a literature-based evaluation of the two search interfaces, a series of evaluations were conducted with expertreviewers, IT experts and WHM content staff from Sunnybrook and Women?s College Health Sciences Centre. Findings from both types of evaluation were compared and deemed to be similar. The current and future web search interfaces are aesthetically pleasing and offer standard search fields for conducting basic searches on the consumer health database. TheOWHC search interface possesses one advantage over the prototype WHM interface; an alphabetically arranged list of health topics. However, the prototype WHM search interface offers more search options in both the basic and advanced search interfaces. Both the current OWHC search interface and prototype WHM interface suffer from inconsistency and/or lack of clarity in terms of labelling search fields and their options. Furthermore, the complexity of the WHM advanced searchinterface, in terms of number of search categories, impairs usability. Modifications to the prototype WHM search interface have been subsequently implemented by Women?s Health Matters before the official launch of this consumer health database and its web interface on the WHM site in late 2003. Thus, two divergent methodological approaches can provide similar insights into effective web design and lead to improvements in the usability of web search interfaces
ACCESS TO THE ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING IN AFRICAN COUNTRIES: SOME REFLECTIONS
No full textThis text presents a set of reflections about the use of electronic publishing in African countries, as a means of access to scientific information. It includes brief remarks about electronic publishing, their advantages and benefits. The text continues with a discussion about the need to find solutions to the problem of the different degrees of access to scientific and technological information between African and developed countries. This includes greater ease in obtaining online information that can aid in the diffusion of scientific data through electronic publishing, in order to support the development of communities, government and particularly the scientific and academic communities of African countries. Attention is given to the matter of the improved circulation of the results of research projects conducted in African countries. The text also focuses on the attitudes and initiatives related to the improvement of the current status of science and technology in African countries. It also examines existing African electronic publishing, which illustrate the degree of concern about this issue among African leaders and office holders. Finally, a brief discussion about the situation of Angola in the access to electronic information is presented
Internet Search Engines and Opacs: Getting the Best of Two Worlds
No full textThis paper reports a pragmatic experiment, consisting on the integration of a Web search engine with a traditional library\u27s catalogue. PORBASE is the Portuguese bibliographic union catalogue. It holds more than one million of bibliographic and nearly half a million of authoritative structured records about authors, families, organizations and subjects. tumba! is a searchengine specialized in indexing web pages in Portuguese language. It indexes actually more than one million of pages, found potentially everywhere in the web. Since the early days of the Web that we have been assisting to a discussion about the pros and cons of web indexes built automatically by search engines as an alternative to traditional human-built databases, as the library\u27s catalogues are. The main argument against search engines has been that they might be very effective in indexing the surface skins of the web, but they miss the richest contents hidden behind the more complex web sites and databases, the so called "deep web". On the other side their defenders point the relatively low cost of those solutions, which make it possible to provide good services without the costs of manual cataloguing, classification, indexing of the resources. This paper reportsabout an experiment to explore the best of both worlds, by using PORBASE in conjunction with tumba!. We extracted from PORBASE the major index of the authorities (names of persons), along with the frequency of each entry, and integrated it within the tumba! search engine. We also developed a very simple HTTP-based interface, ESPONJA, which tumba! can useto launch queries in PORBASE using the authoritative descriptions as arguments. In the scenario of this experiment, a user performing a search session using tumba! will be able to search also in PORBASE using the authoritative form of the search terms without knowing them in advance. The process starts when tumba! presents its own results complemented with suggestions (tips) to search in PORBASE. If the user chooses to launch a search there, a new window is opened showing the results of a search for the term. After that it is up to the user to continue interacting with PORBASE, to explore new results and take advantage of the specific functions of its specialized catalogue. This work aims to be only a proof of concept for this approach. Next steps will comprise the tuning of the algorithms to process the authority information in tumba!, and theformalization of the ESPONJA interface toward a stable, open, generic and reliable interface for interoperability with BN\u27s specialized bibliographic systems
Using a Private Uddi for Publishing Location-Based Information to Mobile Users
No full textThis paper describes our experience with the use of Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) technology for supporting location-based service discovery. Our goal is to allow Web Services to be associated with physical locations and then queried according to spatial criteria. This would enable location-based applications to use local UDDI registries todiscover the Web Services that are relevant for the current location of a mobile user. However, the current model for Web Services discovery in UDDI does not directly support the particular requirements of location-based discovery. The main limitation is the inadequacy of the query-processing mechanism, based on exact matching between query criteria and servicecategorizations, to support discovery models based on proximity. We propose an approach that includes a space model that allows external entities to obtain information about the spatial structure of the local environment, a set of querying taxonomies that allow UDDI queries to include spatial criteria while maintaining conformance with the UDDI standards, and a proxy that allows application to benefit from spatial queries while maintaining the approach transparent. This approach iscurrently being used and evaluated in the VADE project
Use of Metadata in a Collaborative Editing Service
No full textOur main motivation for identifying the metadata present in a collaborative editing service was to offer it through electronic commerce, as we have previously done some work in the definition of electronic commerce of services. In this work we focused in controlling complex services with the help of a workflow [1] for offering them through electronic commerce. Wehave also identified the metadata present in complex services [2, 3] and now we want to go a step further by identifying metadata present in content generated by a specific complex service, collaborative editing of multimedia documents. To help us in doing this identification, we have taken the metadata defined in Learning Object Metadata (LOM) [4] as a startingpoint. In this paper, we show the selection and adaptation of this schema to our needs and also the use we make of this information in the collaborative editing service. The final result of this task should be a new schema, completely addressed to the collaborative editing service. The complex service collaborative editing of multimedia documents has been selected inthis work for its relationship with electronic publishing1