23700051
Fourth-phase digital libraries: pacing, linking, annotating and citing in multimedia collections
We discuss the implications of the use of current multimedia collections and posit that it is possible to build what we term fourth-phase digital libraries (4PDLs). In 4PDLs users can take advantage of both the powerful audiovisual channels and the proven practices developed for media such as text. We demonstrate how various technologies can be integrated to produce a 4PDL.
12404157
A Specific Domain Translator Application in a Floristic Digital Library
In this paper, SAVIA is introduced; a system for attaining automatic translation (English-to-Spanish) of morphological descriptions of plants. It was developed at Universidad de las Americas Puebla, as part of a collaborative research with the Flora of North America (FNA) project, currently under construction at the Missouri Botanical Garden [Schnase et al. 1994]. The system has been put forward as a potential solution to the problem of knowledge distribution and multilingual access to Digital Libraries.
14596570
Managing cognitive overload in the Flora of North America project
The Flora of North America (FNA) is a large-scale collaboration involving over 800 scientists working together to create a 30-volume compendium of all naturally-occurring plants in North America. The size and complexity of the project result in significant cognitive overload which comprises not just information or data but also work practices and activities. We view FNA as a distributed cognitive system where information, people, artifacts, processes and expertise are functionally distributed among members of the community. Our Web-based work environment, the FNA Internet Information Service (FNA IIS), implements role-based views derived from the socially constructed roles that exist within FNA. We propose that the concepts of role-based views and boundary object reification represent at least a partial answer to the problems of complexity management and information overload in large-scale collaborative systems such as FNA.
5575203
X-tract: structure extraction from botanical textual descriptions
Most available information today, both from printed books and digital repositories, is in the form of free-format texts. The task of retrieving information from these ever-growing repositories has become a challenge for information retrieval (IR) researchers. In some fields, such as botany and taxonomy, textual descriptions observe a set of rules and use a relatively limited vocabulary. This makes botanical textual descriptions an interesting area to explore IR techniques for finding structure and facilitating semantic analysis. This paper presents X-tract, a solution to the problem of text analysis and structure extraction in a specific application domain, namely floristic morphologic descriptions. The solution demonstrates the potential of using a grammar in the determination of information structure in a botanical digital library. We have developed a prototype based on this approach in which given an HTML or plain text, X-tract analyzes it and presents results to the user so he or she can verify the proposed structure before updating the database. This transformation is useful also in the process of storing morphologic descriptions in a database with a preestablished format. The solution is implemented in the context of the Floristic Digital Library (FDL), a large digital library project comprising a wide variety of botanical documents, formats and services.
361845
Divide-and-conquer approach for brain machine interfaces: nonlinear mixture of competitive linear models
This paper proposes a divide-and-conquer strategy for designing brain machine interfaces. A nonlinear combination of competitively trained local linear models (experts) is used to identify the mapping from neuronal activity in cortical areas associated with arm movement to the hand position of a primate. The proposed architecture and the training algorithm are described in detail and numerical performance comparisons with alternative linear and nonlinear modeling approaches, including time-delay neural networks and recursive multilayer perceptrons, are presented. This new strategy allows training the local linear models using normalized LMS and using a relatively smaller nonlinear network to efficiently combine the predictions of the linear experts. This leads to savings in computational requirements, while the performance is still similar to a large fully nonlinear network.
7626983
Intelligent Remote Monitoring
Intelligent monitoring facilities are of paramount importance in both service and network management as they provide the capability to monitor quality of service and utilisation parameters and notify degradations so that corrective action can be taken. By intelligent, we refer to the capability of performing the monitoring tasks in a way that has the smallest possible impact on the managed network, facilitates the observation and summarisation of information according to a number of criteria and, in its most advanced form, permits the specification of these criteria dynamically to suit the particular policy in hand. The OSI management metric monitoring and summarisation management functions provide models that only partially satisfy the above requirements. This paper describes our extensions to the proposed models to support further capabilities, with the intention to eventually lead to fully dynamically defined monitoring policies. The concept of distributing intelligence is also discussed, including the consideration of security issues and the applicability of the model in CORBA-based environments.