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CITIDEL Collection Building
The aim of this study is to facilitate the goals of the Computing and Information Technology Interactive Digital Educational Library (CITIDEL) by increasing the number of collections available to it. This study will help in achieving this goal by focusing on four diverse collections
Rapid Modeling, Prototyping, and Generation of Digital Libraries- A Theory-Based Approach
Despite some development in the area of DL architectures and systems, there is still little support for the complete life cycle of DL development, including requirements gathering, conceptual modeling, rapid prototyping, and code generation and reuse. Even when partially supported, those activities are uncorrelated within the current systems, which can lead to inconsistencies and incompleteness. Moreover, the current few existing approaches are not supported by comprehensive and formal foundations and theories, which brings problems of interoperability and makes it extremely difficult to adapt and tailor systems to specific societal preferences and needs of the target community. In this paper, having the 5S formal theoretical framework as support, we present an architecture and a family of tools that allow rapid modeling, prototyping, and generation of digital libraries. 5S stands for Streams, Structures, Spaces, Scenarios, and Societies and is our formal theory for DLs. 5SL is a domain-specific, declarative language for DL conceptual modeling. 5SGraph is a visual modeling tool that helps designers to model a digital library without knowing the theoretical foundations and the syntactical details of 5SL. Furthermore, 5SGraph maintains semantic constraints specified by a 5S metamodel and enforces these constraints over the instance model to ensure semantic consistency and correctness. 5SGraph also enables component reuse to reduce the time and efforts of designers. 5SLGen is a DL generation tool that takes specifications in 5SL and a set of component pools and generates portions of a running DL system. The outputs of 5SLGen include user interface prototypes, in a generic UI markup language, for validation of services behavior and workflow representations of the running system, generated to support the desired scenarios
Streams, Structures, Spaces, Scenarios, Societies (5S): A Formal Model for Digital Libraries
Digital libraries (DLs) are complex information systems and therefore demand formal foundations lest development efforts diverge and interoperability suffers. In this paper, we propose the fundamental abstractions of Streams, Structures, Spaces, Scenarios, and Societies (5S), which allow us to define digital libraries rigorously and usefully. Streams are sequences of arbitrary items used to describe both static and dynamic (e.g., video) content. Structures can be viewed as labeled directed graphs, which impose organization. Spaces are sets with operations on those sets that obey certain constraints. Scenarios consist of sequences of events or actions that modify states of a computation in order to accomplish a functional requirement. Societies are sets of entities and activities and the relationships between and among them. Together these abstractions provide a formal foundation to define, relate, and unify concepts - among others, of digital objects, metadata, collections, and services - required to formalize and elucidate "digital libraries". The applicability, versatility and unifying power of the 5S model are demonstrated through its use in three distinct applications: building and interpretation of a DL taxonomy, informal and formal analysis of case studies of digital libraries (NDLTD and OAI), and utilization as a formal basis for a DL description language
Science of Digital Libraries(SciDL)
Our purpose is to ensure that people and institutions better manage information through digital libraries (DLs). Thus we address a fundamental human and social need, which is particularly urgent in the modern Information (and Knowledge) Age. Our goal is to significantly advance both the theory and state-of-theart of DLs (and other advanced information systems) - thoroughly validating our approach using highly visible testbeds. Our research objective is to leverage our formal, theory-based approach to the problems
of defining, understanding, modeling, building, personalizing, and evaluating DLs. We will construct models and tools based on that theory so organizations and individuals can easily create and maintain fully functional DLs, whose components can interoperate with corresponding components of related DLs. This research should be highly meritorious intellectually. We bring together a team of senior researchers with expertise in information retrieval, human-computer interaction, scenario-based design, personalization, and componentized system development and expect to make important contributions in each of those areas. Of crucial import, however, is that we will integrate our prior research and experience to achieve breakthrough advances in the field of DLs, regarding theory, methodology, systems, and evaluation. We will extend the 5S theory, which has identified five key dimensions or onstructs underlying effective DLs: Streams, Structures, Spaces, Scenarios, and Societies. We will use that theory to describe and develop metamodels, models, and systems, which can be tailored to disciplines and/or groups, as well as personalized. We will disseminate our findings as well as provide toolkits as open source software, encouraging wide use. We will validate our work using testbeds, ensuring broad impact. We will put powerful tools into the hands of digital librarians so they may easily plan and configure tailored systems, to support an extensible set of services, including publishing, discovery, searching, browsing, recommending, and access control, handling diverse types of collections, and varied genres and classes of digital objects. With these tools, end-users will for be able to design personal DLs.
Testbeds are crucial to validate scientific theories and will be thoroughly integrated into SciDL research and evaluation. We will focus on two application domains, which together should allow comprehensive validation and increase the significance of SciDL's impact on scholarly communities. One is education (through CITIDEL); the other is libraries (through DLA and OCKHAM). CITIDEL deals with content from publishers (e.g, ACM Digital Library), corporate research efforts e.g., CiteSeer), volunteer initiatives (e.g., DBLP, based on the database and logic rogramming literature), CS departments (e.g., NCSTRL, mostly technical reports), educational initiatives (e.g., Computer Science Teaching Center), and universities (e.g., theses and dissertations). DLA is a unit of the Virginia Tech library that virtually publishes scholarly communication such as faculty-edited journals and rare and unique resources including image collections and finding aids from Special Collections. The OCKHAM initiative, calling for simplicity in the library world, emphasizes a three-part solution: lightweightprotocols, component-based development, and open reference models. It provides a framework to research the deployment of the SciDL approach in libraries. Thus our choice of testbeds also will nsure that our research will have additional benefit to and impact on the fields of computing and library and information science, supporting transformations in how we learn and deal with information
An Architecture for Multischeming in Digital Libraries
In this paper we discuss the problem of handling many classification schemes within the context of a single digital library concurrently, which we term multischeming. We discuss how to represent which category describes an object in the digital library in this system, as well as the workings of the browsing process which is performed by the user. We motivate this problem as related to digital library interoperability, and propose an architecture for representation of classification schemes in the digital library which solves the problem. We also discuss its implementation in the CITIDEL project
Grid Community Characteristics and their Relation to Grid Security
The size, dynamics, composition and similar characteristics of Grid Communities constitute important data for Grid security requirements gathering and analysis. Collaborative Grid Communities are especially important as they constitute an important part of grid usage modes and demonstrate the need for more advanced Grid security solutions very clearly. This document reports the results of a survey conducted in the Fall of 2002 among members of the Grid community as to understand the needs of grid user and grid application developer communities today, provide information on and typical modes-of-use, and elicit requirements for future grid security systems
Optimization and Blending of Composite Laminates Using Genetic Algorithms with Migration
Optimization of aircraft stiffened composite panel structures often results in manufacturing incompatibilities between adjacent panels. Using genetic algorithms to optimize local panel stacking sequences allows panel populations of stacking sequences to evolve in parallel and send migrants to adjacent panels, so as to blend the local panel designs globally. The blending process is accomplished using the edit distance between individuals of a population and the set of migrants from adjacent panels. The objective function evaluating the fitness of designs is modified according to the severity of mismatches detected between neighboring populations. This lays the ground work for natural evolution to a blended global solution without leaving the paradigm of genetic algorithms
Confirming the Effectiveness of the Requirements Generation Model
Product quality is directly related to how well that product meets the customer’s needs and intents. It is paramount, therefore, to capture customer requirements correctly and succinctly. Unfortunately, most development models tend to avoid, or only vaguely define the process by which requirements are generated. Other models rely on formalistic characterizations that require specialized training to understand. To address such drawbacks we introduce the Requirements Generation Model (RGM) that (a) decomposes the conventional “requirements analysis†phase into sub-phases which focus and refine requirements generation activities, (b) constrains and structures those activities, and (c) incorporates a monitoring methodology to assist in detecting and resolving deviations from process activities defined by the RGM. The results of an industry-based study are also presented and substantiate the effectiveness of the RGM in producing a better set of requirements
Crawling on the World Wide Web
As the World Wide Web grows rapidly, a web search engine is needed for people to search through the Web. The crawler is an important module of a web search engine. The quality of a crawler directly affects the searching quality of such web search engines. Given some seed URLs, the crawler should retrieve the web pages of those URLs, parse the HTML files, add new URLs into its buffer and go back to the first phase of this cycle. The crawler also can retrieve some other information from the HTML files as it is parsing them to get the new URLs. This paper describes the design, implementation, and some considerations of a new crawler programmed as an learning exercise and for possible use for experimental studies
Usability Inspection Report of iLumina
iLumina is a digital library of sharable undergraduate teaching resource materials for science, mathematics, technology, and engineering being developed by the University of North Carolina at Wilmington (UNCW), Collegis, Virginia Tech, Georgia State University, Grand Valley State and
The College of New Jersey. Types of iLumina resources include papers, tutorials, applets,
presentations, visualizations, experiments, assignments, software, exercises