University of Illinois DLib Test Suite Quarterly Report for July-September 1999

University of Illinois DLib Test Suite Quarterly Report for April-June 2000
Collection Growth

More than 3200 full-content journal articles were processed, indexed, and added to the testbed.

Also, ACM and Elsevier have been officially added to our industrial partners program, and have contributed some of their journal titles to the testbed. We plan to have these materials added to our testbed during the 3^rd quarter, and continue to add articles in an ongoing basis after that.

MathML

Discussions were held with Wolfram Research about hosting a MathML conference. Grainger Engineering Library will be hosting and co-sponsoring, along with Wolfram Research, IBM, AMS, Waterloo Maple, and the W3C, the conference in October, see http://www.mathmlconference.org/.

Work has also begun on the conversion of our 'legacy' SGML marked up mathematics to the MathML standard. We also started work on applying our mathematics rendering techniques to the MathML standard.

We will be presenting a paper at the MathML conference on this work, titled Illinois DLIB Testbed Technologies for Converting Legacy Mathematics for Display on the Web. The abstract is available at http://dli.grainger.uiuc.edu/publications/mathmlconf/abstract.htm.

Relational Database Designs

An initial design and prototype of a relational database for indexing and searching both the structured full text and metadata of our article collection was completed. We plan to continue development of this prototype, as well as exploring other alternatives, and eventually replace our proprietary OpenText LiveLink database with an SQL relational database.

D-Lib Cross-repository Metadata

Initial development of a D-Lib Cross-repository metadata database was also completed. This included harvesting metadata from four of the D-Lib testbeds, including Berkeley, UIUC, DLib Magazine, and Netlib at Tennessee. The metadata was then organized according to the Dublin Core (DC) standard, added to a relational database, and indexed for searching. Scripts and web forms were then developed for searching this collection over the web, see http://dli.grainger.uiuc.edu/dlibmeta/searchform.asp.

Future work in this area will include adding additional metadata, refinements to the search forms, and exploration of distributing the repository.

Publications

A paper titled Illinois DLIB Testbed Technologies for Converting Legacy Mathematics for Display on the Web will be presented at the MathML International Conference in October. An abstract is available at at http://dli.grainger.uiuc.edu/publications/mathmlconf/abstract.htm.

Ongoing Work

We are continuing improvements to the mathematics rendering. Raster image versions of all the mathematics, for use with older web browsers, has been completed for all publishers. We are also working on incorporation of the ACM and Elsevier journal titles, as well as the redesigned DTD for ASCE, into our processing stream.

Presentations, Visitors, and Outside Researchers

We hosted a delegation of managers and engineers from the NTT J-Stage project in Japan. This included two representatives from the Japan Science and Technology Corporation (JST). We held four days of meetings and discussions at various levels of technical detail with this group.

We also hosted a meeting of the D-Lib Test Suite Project participants which was attended by representatives from the various other D-Lib projects, including CMU, CNRI, DARPA, NIST, UCB, UCSB, and UIUC. Discussions centered around the ISO11179 metadata standard

We made a presentation to the UIUC Library faculty and staff on the various XML technologies which we have used in the testbed and how those technologies might be applied to other projects at the University of Illinois Libraries.