University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Digital Libraries Initiative
Comments to: External Relations Coordinator, Tom Habing
10/15/96
Testbed
The Testbed repository will move into formal production in this period, starting in the Engineering Library with the custom client and moving across the entire University of Illinois campus as the Internet client becomes available (see below). The SGML processing and display will be refined to support production for all the current publishers: physics (APS,AIP), computer science (IEEE CS), electrical engineering (IEEE), civil engineering (ASCE). The federated search available using the normalized tags and the OpenText engine will be evolved for heavy production usage. Work will continue on effective display of scientific literature, such as equations and tables.
Internet
The multiple view client will be ported from Visual Basic to JAVA and deployed in place of the custom client currently used. This supports drag and drop between different search types, currently including subject thesauri, co-occurrence lists, and full-text engines. The state of sessions is recorded across repositories in the Net to allow search histories to be reused. Multiple protocols are supported to distributed repositories -- these will include a socket connection to OpenText, HTTP to Web search engines, and a simple Z39.50 protocol incorporating the CNDIR ISITE software. The first version of the NCSA server 2.0 moving towards repositories will be deployed, incorporating modules for protocols and security. Improved administration will allow metadata checking and link support, so that the deposit process is part of the server rather than separate.
Research
The concept spaces computed across Compendex (1000 community repositories using 5,000,000 abstracts across all of engineering) will be utilized for vocabulary switching experiments. This should develop space intersection techniques for supporting term suggestions across subject domains. Another large experiment using Inspec will be run, again using the largest supercomputers at NCSA. Roughly the same scale of abstracts will be used but at a much finer granularity (Inspec covers electrical engineering, computer science, and physics). This will enable a coarse-grain and a fine-grain switching comparison. The analysis environment will produce the first Interspace prototype in Smalltalk using CORBA and ObjectStore. This prototype will support vocabulary switching across the large engineering spaces and some personal data, in addition to the beginnings of groupings and correlations.
Evaluation
Since the Testbed will now be operational throughout the entire period, we will conduct in-depth study of research groups representing primary users of the DLI testbed. We will investigate nature of work and collaboration, use of information, and DLI testbed usability and use in Physics/Astronomy and at least one other discipline. Each research group will be studied for about 3 months, with the Physics/Astronomy group receiving primary attention in Jan.-March 1996. At the same time, we will develop programs for collecting instrumentation data, then collect and analyze user registration and system instrumentation data from the current custom client Testbed usage. Online DLI user surveys will be conducted, periodically throughout the year. Finally, we plan another Allerton Institute on "Digital Library Use" to boost the developing community of evaluators.
Principal Investigator: Bruce Schatz
Testbed Supervisor: Bill Mischo (University Library)
Technical Lead: Tim Cole
Internet Supervisor: Joseph Hardin (NCSA)
Technical Lead: Beth Frank
Research Supervisor: Bruce Schatz (GSLIS)
coPIs: Hsinchun Chen, Roy Campbell, Pauline Cochrane
Evaluation Supervisor: Ann Bishop (GSLIS)
coPI: Leigh Star
Testbed:
Programmer (Repository): Bob Ferrer
Programmer (Search): Maria Pflaum
Students: Donal O'Connor, Jing Zhao
Coordinator: Susan Harum
Internet:
Programmer (Client): Eric Johnson (Library)
Programmer (Server): Jason Ng
Server Architecture: Dan LaLiberte
SGML Standards: Tom Magliery
Research:
Programmer (Algorithms): Dorbin Ng (Arizona)
Programmer (Environments): Kevin Powell
Students (Interspace): Sarim Siddiqui, Conrad Chang
NSF Liason: Ben Gross
Students (Computer Science): Yongchen Li, Varna Puvvada, Ravi Chandran
Evaluation:
Students: Emily Ignacio, Bob Sandusky, Laura Neumann
Publishers:
AIP American Institute of Physics (Applied Physics)
APS American Physical Society (Theoretical Physics)
AAS American Astronomical Society
ASAE American Society Agricultural Engineers
ASCE American Society Civil Engineers
AIAA American Institute Aeronautics & Astronautics
IEEE Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
IEEE CS IEEE Computer Society
IEE Institution of Electrical Engineers (British)
EI Engineering Information (Compendex)
John Wiley
Academic Press
AAAS American Association Advancement Science
Software:
SoftQuad
OpenText
Hewlett-Packard
EBT
OCLC
CNRI
Microsoft
DLI Projects:
Stanford (interoperability)
Santa Barbara (texture map concept space)
Carnegie-Mellon (NetBill)
Michigan (User Interfaces)
Go back to the DLI progress reports page