II. JOBS
1.
ISTG: Professor: Computer
Science
III. NOTICES
A. Publications
1.
Journal: Information Agents: Theory
& Applications:
Final
CFPapers
B.
Meetings
1.
IRSG 2000: CFPapers
2. RIAO 2000: Final Conference
Reminder
3. 5th Intl. Conference on
Fuzzy Sets Theory & Its
Applications: Special Session on Fuzzy Querying
4. 2nd Intl. Workshop: Natural
Language & Information Systems:
CFPapers
IV. PROJECTS
D. Miscellaneous
1.
Social and Economic Implications of
IT: Bibliographic Pilot
2. Report from Santa Fe E-print
Archiving Meeting
A position of full professor in Computer Science will be created in
January 2000 by the University and affected to the "Institut des
Sciences et Techniques de Grenoble" (ISTG).
Applications are sought from senior researchers involved in the domain of
Information Retrieval (IR), with a specific interest for multimedia IR,
advanced models for IR, and interactive IR. The research activity will
integrated to the CLIPS-IMAG laboratory
(http://www-clips.imag.fr/),
a laboratory dedicated to man-machine communication (including natural
language processing, engineering of interactive systems, multimedia
information retrieval).
Informal enquiries may be made to Prof. Y. Chiaramella (chiara@imag.fr,
tel : (33) 4 76 51 46 02)
IMPORTANT :
- being a government (i.e., permanent) position, applications must
conform to a specific procedure starting soon with the registration to
the "liste de qualification" (a nation wide procedure for
preselecting candidates).
THIS IS A FIRST MANDATORY STEP which may be simply done in filling an
electronic document found at the government website before NOVEMBER 10,
1999: http://antares.adc.education.fr/antares/
- Note that for Computer Science the
reference administrative section is the 27th (this info may be asked
further in the application procedure)
- candidates must be fluent in spoken French language
IMPORTANT DATES
- Submission of Manuscripts: NOVEMBER 25, 1999
- Notification of Acceptance: MARCH 30, 2000
- Publication of Special Issue due to: Fall 2000
SCOPE & TOPICS
This special double issue of the International Journal on Cooperative
Information Systems is devoted to advances in theory and applications of
intelligent information agents. Roughly speaking, an information agent is
a computational software entity that has access to one or multiple,
heterogeneous and geographically distributed information sources; it
pro-actively searches for and maintains relevant information on behalf of
users or other agents preferably in a just-in-time fashion. Such an agent
is supposed to satisfy one or multiple of following requirements:
* Information acquisition and management, i.e., it may monitor,
update,
and provide transparent access to one or many different
information
sources, retrieve, extract, analyze and filter data (including
semi-
structured or even unstructured data).
* Information synthesis and presentation, that is, it is able to
integrate heterogeneous data and to provide unified (and
multi-
dimensional) views on data.
* Intelligent user assistance by being able, for example to
dynamically
adapt to user preferences, any kind of changes in information
and
network environment.
It may provide convenient individual interactive assistance for everyday
business on the Internet such as a life-like character, recommend sources
and future work steps, etc. In other words, the agent helps to manage and
overcome the difficulties associated with information overload. In part,
there are many approaches and implemented solutions available from
advanced databases, knowledge-bases and distributed information systems
technology to meet some of these demands. The effective and efficient
access to information on the Internet and Web has become a critical
research area.
Information agents technology emerged as part of the more general
intelligent software agent technology around seven years ago mainly as a
response to the increasing challenges of the cyberspace from both, the
technological and human user perspective. It is an inherently
interdisciplinary technology encompassing approaches, methods and tools
from different research disciplines such as Artificial Intelligence (AI),
Advanced Database and Knowledge Base Systems, Distributed Information
Systems, Information Retrieval, Cognitive Sciences and Human Computer
Interaction (HCI). Today, it can be seen as one of the key technologies
for the actual and future Internet and worldwide Web.
Topics are but not limited to:
* Architectures of (Systems of) Information Agents
-General and specific architectures of information agents in
different
settings and environments.
-Approaches for communication and collaboration between (systems)
of
information agents.
-Service matchmaking and brokering.
-Inter-Agent Communication languages.
* Advanced Database and Knowledge-Base Technology
-Interoperability in large-scaled, and uncertain information
environments.
-Application of Techniques for Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery
in
open, distributed and dynamically changing environments.
* Methods of Adaptation and Learning for Systems of Information
Agents
-Methods for automated uncertain reasoning for information agents.
-Computation and action under uncertainty and limited resources.
-Performance and measurement of adaptation of single agent or
multiagent systems in uncertain information environments.
* Mobility and Issues of Security in the Internet
-Architectures, Environments and Languages for Mobile and Secure
-Information Agents and Servers.
-Secure agent execution and protection of data servers from
malicious
agents.
-Cooperating Information Agents in wearable computers, hand-held
and/or
satellite-based control devices.
* Rational Information Agents and Electronic Commerce
-Agent-Based Marketplaces, Coalition Formation, Auctions, Negotiations.
-Economic models of cooperative problem solving among rational
information agents in open information environments.
-Methods for prevention and detection of lying rational information
agents.
-Electronic Commerce with incomplete and uncertain informations.
-Standards for privacy of communication, security, and jurisdiction
for
agent-mediated deals.
* Human-Agent Interaction
-Synthetic Agents, believable avatars, and 3-D multimedia-based
representation of user information spaces in the Internet.
-Models and Implementation of Advanced Interfaces for conversation
and
dialogue among Information Agents and Users.
* Systems and Applications
-Systems and Applications of multiple collaborating Information
Agents
on the Internet.
PREPARATION OF MANUSCRIPT
The length of the contribution should not exceed 22 pages. For guidelines
on manuscript preparation please check the relevant last 5 pages in any
issue of the journal, and check the Web site of the International Journal
on Cooperative Information Systems at:
http://www.wspc.com.sg/journals/ijcis/ijcis.html
SUBMISSION
Manuscripts are to be submitted by (electronic) mail to the Guest Editor
(see below). Authors may suggest the appropriate persons to
review/referee their paper, however, the Editor need not necessarily take
up the suggestion. Authors may request that their identity be kept
unknown to the referee. Camera-ready manuscripts are to be prepared
according to the instructions provided in any issue of the journal,
preferably using LATEX or TEX. Please submit your manuscript by E-Mail
(printable POSTSCRIPT - A4 format- AND the original text file) to
klusch@dfki.de
OR
Mail (5 Hard Copies) to
Matthias Klusch
DFKI GmbH
Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3
66123 Saarbruecken, Germany.
Dr. Matthias Klusch
DFKI German AI Research Center Ltd.
Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3
66123 Saarbruecken, Germany
Phone: +49-681-302 5297
Fax: +49-681-302 2235 http://www.dfki.de/~klusch/
**********
III.B.1.
Fr: Ayse S Goker-Arslan <asga@scms.rgu.ac.uk>
Re: IRSG 2000: CFPapers
IRSG2000
2nd Annual Colloquium on IR Research (BCS-IRSG, CEPIS)
5-7 April, 1999
Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge
CALL FOR PAPERS
This annual colloquium on information retrieval research provides an
opportunity for both new and established researchers to present papers
describing work in progress or final results.
Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
*Evaluation and testing of information retrieval systems
*Information retrieval and the Web
*Hypermedia/Multimedia indexing and retrieval
*Information retrieval from non-text media (including spoken
document,
image/video retrieval)
*Voice processing and retrieval
*Logic and information retrieval
*User interfaces for information retrieval
*User interaction in information retrieval
*Information retrieval in library systems
*Networked information retrieval
*Database and information retrieval integration
*Data mining and information extraction
*Natural language processing for information retrieval
*Knowledge-based information retrieval
*Intelligent information retrieval
*Commercial applications of information retrieval systems
SUBMISSIONS
Authors are required to submit their paper, in English, by 10 December
1999.
Papers should contain at most 7500 words and be double-spaced. The
abstract should not exceed 100 words.
Final papers will be required in the Electronic Workshops in Computing
format
(http://www.ewic.org.uk/ewic/).
Authors are encouraged to submit papers in this format.
The submission should include two PostScript copies of the paper: one
full copy and one anonymous. Both files should be submitted by anonymous
ftp to
ftp.scms.rgu.ac.uk
under the /pub/incoming/irsg2000 directory. The file names should reflect
the title of the paper but the anonymous copy should have the prefix
"anon". (To protect author privacy it will not be possible to
list files in this directory).
For the anonymous copy, the first page must contain the title of the
paper and abstract, but no indication about the author(s) and
affiliation(s).
In addition, authors must send an email message to
irsg2000@scms.rgu.ac.uk containing the title of the paper, the name of
the file that has been submitted, the author name(s), and the author
affiliation(s), plus complete contact information (mailing address,
telephone, fax and e-mail) for the author to whom correspondence should
be sent.
Any queries regarding submission should be sent to: asga@scms.rgu.ac.uk
IMPORTANT DATES
Paper
submission:
10 December 1999.
Notification of acceptance: 10 February 2000.
Final copy
due:
10 March 2000.
PUBLICATION
All papers will be refereed. Following notification of acceptance,
authors of selected papers will have until 10 March 2000 to make
revisions in the light of referees' comments. Papers will be published in
the draft proceedings which will be circulated to all delegates during
the Colloquium. Final papers will be published in the Electronic
Workshops in Computing
(Springer-Verlag)
http://www.ewic.org.uk/ewic/.
CONTACTS
If you have any queries or problems concerning submitting a paper, please
contact:
Dr. Ayse Göker
School of Computer and Mathematical Sciences
The Robert Gordon University
St. Andrew Street
Aberdeen AB25 1HG
Scotland, UK
Tel: +44 (0) 1224-262713
Fax: +44 (0) 1224-262727
Email: asga@scms.rgu.ac.uk
**********
III.B.2.
Fr: Jeff Allen <jeff@elda.fr>
Re: RIAO 2000: Final Conference Reminder
Final conference reminder for RIAO 2000. Please note the 8 November paper
submission deadline and the extended deadline until 17 November for
Innovative Applications demos.
LAST CALL FOR PAPERS & APPLICATION DEMONSTRATIONS
RIAO 2000: Content-Based Multimedia Information Access
College de France
Paris, France
April 12-14, 2000
Web site:
http://host.limsi.fr/RIAO
Organized by:
C.I.D.(France) & C.A.S.I.S. (USA)
With the collaboration of AII, ASIS, ELRA, Elsnet, ESCA, Francil
(preliminary list)
INTRODUCTION
The conference scope will range from the traditional processing of text
documents to the rapidly growing field of automatic indexing and
retrieval of images and speech and, more generally, to all processing of
audio-visual and multimedia information on various distribution venues,
including the Net. The conference is of interest for several scientific
communities, including Information Retrieval, Natural Language
Processing, Spoken Language Processing, Computer Vision, Human-Computer
Interaction and Digital Libraries. RIAO 2000 will, thereby, serve as a
forum for cross-discipline initiatives and innovative applications.
RIAO 2000 will present recent scientific progress, demonstrations of
prototypes resulting from this research as well as the most innovative
products now appearing on the market. A worldwide Call for Papers is
addressed to researchers engaged in academic or industrial research. The
associated Call for Applications is addressed to companies and public
organizations developing or marketing hardware or software related to the
conference topics.
The RIAO (Computer-Assisted Information Retrieval) International
Conference is held every 3 years. Sites for the conference have been
Grenoble (1985), Boston (1988), Barcelona (1991), New York (1994) and
Montreal (1997).
RIAO 2000 Conference Topics:
A. Document processing:
A.1. Hypertextual and Hypermedia documents
A.2. Human-Computer Interaction for document handling
A.3. Textual and voice-based annotation creation and retrieval
A.4. Digital libraries
A.5. AI techniques for document generation and consultation
A.6. Multimodal and transmodal human-machine communication
B. Information Retrieval:
B.1. Information retrieval systems and methods
B.2. Document search over the internet, Text Mining
B.3. Information and document routing/profiling/alerting
B.4. Document classification
C. Spoken Language Processing:
C.1. Voice-based document segmentation and transcription
C.2. Voice-based document indexing and retrieval
C.3. Identification of language of speaker
C.4. Speaker recognition, Audio Mining
C.5. Non-verbal sound processing (music, noise...)
D. Natural Language Processing:
D.1. Information extraction
D.2. NLP techniques for document processing
D.3. Terminology extraction and analysis
D.4. Automatic thesaurus construction
D.5. Multilingual and crosslingual document handling
D.6. Machine translation of documents
D.7. Automatic summarization
D.8. Identification of language of text
E. Image processing:
E.1. Automatic indexing and retrieval of visual documents
E.2. Computer graphics for document generation and consultation
E.3. Segmentation and indexing of visual data
E.4. Face, gaze and expression recognition
E.5. Character recognition in visual documents
E.6. Image Mining, Video indexing and retrieval
F. System architecture:
F.1. Multi-agent architecture, search agents
F.2. Intelligent agents, Androids and Avatars
G. Usage and best practice:
G.1. Socio-economics of information retrieval
G.2. Quantitative, qualitative and comparative evaluation
G.3. Coding standards and Quality of Services, Security and privacy
G.4. Cognitive aspects, Human Factors and Ergonomics
G.5. Legal aspects of multimedia document handling
G.6. Multimedia and multimodal resources
H. Applications:
H.1. Computer-aided information access for the handicapped
H.2. Multimedia systems for medical applications
H.3. Image Guided Surgery and Augmented Reality
H.4. Medical documents archiving and retrieval
H.5. Transmodal information access systems
H.6. Telephone-based, nomad and in-vehicle systems
H.7. Intelligent systems for call-center reporting
H.8. Customized customer support (Aerospace product manuals...)
H.9. Strategic and technology watch & Business Intelligence
H.10. Real-Time information access for financial markets
H.11. Information access for decision aid systems
H.12. Multimodal Geographical Information Systems
H.13. Television and Radio Broadcast Archiving and Browsing...
CALL FOR PAPERS
The Scientific Program will include invited talks, presentations of
accepted papers in oral and poster sessions and panel sessions. There
will be parallel sessions, devoted to a given research field, and plenary
sessions, presenting topics of interest for all participants. The mode of
presentation (oral versus poster) will be based on the appropriateness of
the paper to that mode of communication, not on the quality of the
paper.
Authors are invited to submit short or long papers on the conference
topics. The papers will be reviewed by the International Scientific
Committee, and selected on the basis of their scientific and
technological quality, their innovative content and their relevance to
the topic of the conference. Interested parties are invited to submit
their paper to the following address:
riao2000@limsi.fr
Subject: Paper Submission
Electronic submissions will be acknowledged within 48 hours. If they are
not acknowledged, please check the Email address and resubmit. See the
RIAO 2000
Web site for all information relevant to submission procedures and
formats, the members of the Program Committee, etc.
CALENDAR:
* Submission
deadline:
***November 8, 1999***
* Notification of acceptance: December 15,
1999
* Submission of complete papers: January 15, 2000
* Final
Program:
January 25, 2000
*
Conference:
April 12-14, 2000
CALL FOR INNOVATIVE APPLICATIONS
In addition to scientific presentations and scientific demonstrations,
Innovative Industrial Applications treating the Conference themes will be
selected by the Applications Committee. Selected applications will be
given on-site demonstration space for the duration of the RIAO'2000
Conference (three days). They will also be awarded a RIAO-branded icon
for their web pages displaying "Selected as Innovative Application
at RIAO'2000". A time will be set aside during the Conference for a
"deal-making" session in which industrial partners can make
contacts with research partners. Interested parties are invited to submit
a short description of their product to the following address:
riao2000@limsi.fr
Subject: Application Submission
Please give your
-- product name
-- a succinct description of its innovative characteristics
-- the RIAO theme(s) that the application addresses
You will be given by return e-mail an application number and instructions
of where to find the complete online submission application. See the RIAO
2000 Web site for all information relevant to submission procedures and
formats, the members of the Application Committee, etc.
CALENDAR (***Caution: Extended Deadlines***):
* First Application Deadline: ***November 17, 1999***
* Notification of Acceptance: December 18,
1999
*
Conference:
April 12-14, 2000
Jeff ALLEN - Technical
Manager/Directeur Technique
European Language Resources Association (ELRA) &
European Language resources - Distribution Agency (ELDA)
(Agence Europe'enne de Distribution des Ressources Linguistiques)
55, rue Brillat-Savarin
75013 Paris FRANCE
Tel: (+33) 1.43.13.33.33 - Fax: (+33) 1.43.13.33.30 mailto:jeff@elda.fr http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html
**********
III.B.3.
Fr: Slawomir Zadrozny <zadrozny@ibspan.waw.pl>
Re: 5th Intl. Conference on Fuzzy Sets Theory & Its
Applications:
Special Session on Fuzzy Querying
Fifth International Conference on Fuzzy Sets Theory
and Its Applications
January 30 -February4, 2000
Liptovský Mikuláš
The Slovak Republic
Special Session/Workshop on FUZZY QUERYING
Call for abstract and participation
Fuzzy querying turns out to be one of the most promising areas of fuzzy
sets theory and fuzzy logic theory application. So far, most popular
lines of research include fuzzy querying of (conventional) databases and
the use of fuzzy concepts in information retrieval. Due to a rapidly
growing amount of information collected in companies, public
administration, private resources, etc., querying becomes a daily
activity of more and more people. These information resources contain
neither strictly well-structured data (best suited to be dealt with using
databases) nor, on the other extreme, almost unstructured bodies of text.
The Internet, a global container of information, with its plethora of
semi- structured documents is here a good example. Multimedia and HTML
files, e-mail message boxes etc. pose a challenge for efficient querying
techniques. Moreover, the source of querying criteria and the ultimate
user of the querying results is a human being. Thus, it seems to be a
vital imperative to provide for human consistency of the querying
techniques. In practical terms, it refers to the use of natural language
based concepts in querying. In the simplest setting, it may consist in
the maintenance of a dictionary of well-defined terms and operations to
be used in a query language. Then, often it would be advantageous if the
results of a query were described using the very same set of linguistic
terms. That opens the door for the application of several relevant
techniques like data mining and summarisation, linguistic approximation,
etc. In fact, putting the whole topic in a broader perspective we can
consider a kind of natural language based data processing or computing
with words postulated recently by Lotfi Zadeh.
The Fifth International Conference on Fuzzy Sets Theory and Its
Applications (FSTA) seems to be a very convenient forum for an open
discussion of the subject of fuzzy querying, roughly depicted above. The
conference, recognised by EUSFLAT as the very first "fuzzy
event" of the new millennium, precedes some other similar events
including FQAS’2000 (Flexible Query Answering Systems) conference in
Warsaw, Poland (October 2000), Special Session on Intelligent Techniques
for Internet Resources at Fourth International Conference on
Knowledge-Based Intelligent Engineering Systems & Allied Technologies
in Brighton, UK (August/September 2000) or special session on database
and information retrieval systems at IFSA Congress/ NAFIPS, in Vancouver,
Canada (July 2001), to quote just a few.
The special session at FSTA is conceived as a less formal forum for the
exchange of ideas relevant for the concept of fuzzy querying, including,
but not limited to, the following topics (practical implementations and
experiences as well as theoretical advances):
· Fuzzy querying languages
· Fuzzy relational algebra
· Use of fuzzy concepts in information retrieval
· Linguistic data mining techniques
· Fuzzy approaches for dealing with various data formats, as, e.g.,
multimedia, HTML, XML
A short abstract (of about 300 words) of the proposed contribution is to
be sent by e-mail to organizers of this workshop Slawomir Zadrozny
(e-mail: zadrozny@ibspan.waw.pl) and Peter Vojtas (e-mail:
vojtas@kosice.upjs.sk) by November 30, 1999 . Proceedings with selected
papers will be published after the conference.
Slawomir Zadrozny
Systems Research Institute phone: +48 22 364103
Polish Academy of Sciences fax: +48 22 372772
01-447 Warszawa
ul. Newelska 6
POLAND
**********
III.B.4.
Fr: Werner Winiwarter <ww@ifs.univie.ac.at>
Re: 2nd Intl. Workshop: Natural Language & Information Systems:
CFPapers
Call for Papers
2nd International Workshop on
Natural Language and Information Systems
NLIS 2000
http://www.ifs.univie.ac.at/~ww/nlis2000.html in conjunction with the
11th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems
Applications
DEXA 2000
Greenwich, United Kingdom
September 4-8, 2000
Workshop proceedings to be published by IEEE Computer Society Press
THEME
The Second International Workshop on Natural Language and Information
Systems will take place on the eve of a new millenium which will bring
unimaginable changes and new challenges. Human Language Technology (HLT)
has reached a level of maturity that makes it feasible to solve many of
the urgent needs of the coming information age. By learning from past
failures and successes we are now ready to apply the new technology to
real-life applications. Multilinguality, mobile speech access to the web,
and automatic knowledge extraction from documents are just a few examples
that show the importance of HLT as a key technology for the new
millenium.
The main objective of this workshop is to bring together researchers from
both natural language processing and information systems with the aim of
encouraging the exchange of ideas and experience between these two
communities. It will provide an international forum for the presentation
of an overview of the most recent trends in these two active research
fields, and a common starting-point to tackle the most acute problems of
information processing.
Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
* Natural language interfaces
* Multimodal interfaces
* Adaptive interfaces
* HLT for information system design
* HLT for conceptual modeling
* HLT for requirements engineering
* HLT for information retrieval and filtering
* HLT for the WWW
* Terminology and ontologies
* Lexical resources and corpora
* Multilinguality
* Computer-assisted language learning
* Machine translation
* Word sense disambiguation
* Document categorization
* Information extraction
* Text summarization
* Natural language learning
* Natural language generation
* Evaluation of natural language systems
IMPORTANT DATES
* Submission deadline: 24
January 2000
* Notification of acceptance: 10 April 2000
* Camera-ready copies: 1
May 2000
SUBMISSION DETAILS
Authors are invited to submit research contributions representing
original, previously unpublished work. Submitted papers will be carefully
evaluated based on originality, significance, technical soundness, and
clarity of exposition. All papers will be refereed by at least two
members of the program committee. Accepted papers will be published by
IEEE Computer Society Press as proceedings of the DEXA 2000 workshops.
All submitted papers MUST be formatted according to the author guidelines
provided by IEEE Computer Society Press and MUST NOT be longer than FIVE
pages. The author guidelines can be found at
http://www.ifs.univie.ac.at/~ww/format.html.
If you use LaTeX, an example document can be found at
http://www.ifs.univie.ac.at/~ww/nlis.tex
and the corresponding output at http://www.ifs.univie.ac.at/~ww/nlis.ps.
Electronic Submission
Please submit your paper electronically to our FTP site. Please prepare
your paper as plain ASCII PostScript only, with NO encoding, condensing,
or encapsulation. Please use TrueType 1 fonts wherever possible. Do not
use bitmapped fonts such as Computer Modern if you can avoid it.
Guidelines for generating and submitting PostScript files are available
from
http://computer.org/author/psguide.htm.
File Naming Conventions for Electronic Submissions
Please save your file using your name, i.e. John Smith's file would be
john_smith.ps. If you are submitting two or more files, please number
them: john_smith1.ps, john_smith2.ps, etc.
Transferring Files to the FTP Site
When transferring files to the FTP site, if you have a choice between
ASCII and binary modes, use binary. Although ASCII mode works well most
of the time, binary mode incurs fewer problems.
Our FTP site:
ftp.ifs.univie.ac.at
Log on as: anonymous
Place files in subdirectory: incoming/nlis2000
Notification
When you have put your file(s) in the FTP subdirectory, please send an
email to winiwarter@acm.org with the following information: Your name,
phone, fax, URL (your Web address, if you have one), your email address,
the title of your paper, and the filename(s) you used. (Do NOT send a
copy of your postscript file via email.)
Hard Copy Paper Submissions
If, for some reason, you cannot place an electronic copy of your paper on
our ftp site, ONLY THEN you may submit it as four hard copies to the
following address:
Prof. Werner Winiwarter
Institute of Applied Computer Science & Information Systems
University of Vienna
Liebiggasse 4/3
A-1010 Wien
AUSTRIA
Electronic Abstracts
Please send also an electronic copy of your abstract, in ASCII format and
including the paper title, keywords, author names, addresses, and
affiliations, to winiwarter@acm.org.
WORKSHOP CHAIRS
* Werner Winiwarter, University of Vienna, Austria
* Robert Dale, Language Technology Pty Ltd and Macquarie
University,
Australia
* Tsunenori Mine, Kyushu University, Japan
For any further questions or inquiries please contact:
Prof. Werner Winiwarter
Institute of Applied Computer Science & Information Systems
University of Vienna
Liebiggasse 4/3, A-1010 Wien, AUSTRIA
Email: winiwarter@acm.org
Phone: +43-1-4277-38434
Fax: +43-1-4277-38449
IV.D.1.
Fr: Eileen Collins, Eileen <ecollins@nsf.gov>
Re: Social and Economic Implications of IT: Bibliographic Pilot
The "Social and Economic Implications of Information
Technologies Bibliographic Data Base" is a pilot project. We
invite you and your colleagues to visit the pilot site
<http://srsweb.nsf.gov/it_site/index.htm
and to send your comments and additional citations, especially citations
to your own relevant work (following the links on the site). Future
development of the site will depend on public response and availability
of funds.
Currently, the pilot site contains over 4,000 citations to data sets,
research papers, books, and web sites about the social and economic
implications of information, communications, and computational
technologies (IT). The citations have been sorted into a series of
searchable listings called Road Maps and include the implications of IT
for the home, education, community, government, science, employment and
work, commerce (including electronic commerce), productivity,
institutional structure, globalization, and selected policy issues. About
one third of the citations in the entire database have abstracts and a
subset of the citations about IT in the home have been specially
annotated.
Note that the pilot site consists of citations, including URLs and hot
links for Web items. It does not contain the data or research works
themselves.
This pilot project was carried out by SRI International's Science and
Technology Policy Program. Support for the site has been provided by the
National Science Foundation Division of Science Resources Studies, the
Computation and Social Systems Program in the Division of Information and
Intelligent Systems, and the Sociology Program, the Societal Dimensions
of Engineering, Science, and Technology Program, and the Science and
Technology Studies Program in the Division of Social and Economic
Sciences.
Eileen L. Collins, Ph.D.
Senior Coordinator and Manager for Assessment Studies
Division of Science Resources Studies
National Science Foundation
Arlington, VA 22230
ecollins@nsf.gov
**********
IV.D.2.
Fr: Clifford Lynch <cliff@cni.org>
Re: Report from Santa Fe E-print Archiving Meeting
Recently, I attended and helped to facilitate a meeting to discuss
interoperability among pre-print and e-print archives in Santa Fe. Those
who are operating or planning to build either institutional or
disciplinary archive servers of this type will, I think, find the report
below of great interest and will want to track further developments from
this initiative.
Clifford Lynch
Director, Coalition for Networked Information
First meeting of the Universal Preprint Service Initiative UPS
Initiative: Paul Ginsparg, Rick Luce, Herbert Van de Sompel
<http://vole.lanl.gov/ups/ups1-press.htm>
Meeting:
* Location: Santa Fe, New Mexcio, US, October 21-22, 1999
* Sponsors: Council on Library and Information Resources, the
Digital
Library Federation, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic
Resources
Coalition, Association of Research Libraries, the Research Library
of
the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
* Meeting moderators: Clifford Lynch & Don Waters.
* Represented institutions/organizations: American Physical
Society,
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Association of Research
Libraries,
California Institute of Technology, Coalition for Networked
Information, Cornell University, Council on Library and
Information
Resources, Digital Library Federation, Harvard University,
HighWire
Press, Library of Congress, Los Alamos National Laboratory,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, NASA Langley, Old
Dominion
University, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources
Coalition, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, University of
California, University of Ghent, University of Southampton,
University of Surrey, Vanderbilt University, Virginia Tech
and
Washington University.
* Represented eprint-initiatives: arXiv.org (=xxx), CogPrints,
NDLTD,
RePEc,
EconWPA, NCSTRL, NTRS
* Participants: see separate list
Executive Summary
The Universal Preprint Service initiative has been set up to create a
forum to discuss and solve matters of interoperability between author
self-archiving solutions, as a way to promote their global acceptance
(see
http://vole.lanl.gov/ups/ups.htm
).
The first, largest and most important such archive is the Los Alamos
National Laboratory (LANL) Physics Archive. Founded by Paul Ginsparg in
1991, LANL now houses over 100,000 papers, mirrored worldwide in 15
countries with over 50,000 users daily and still growing (see
http://arXiv.org/cgi-bin/show_stats/
). Other disciplines and institutions have begun to create public
research archives along the lines of LANL, but what is needed are
conventions that archives could adopt to ensure that they work together
so that any paper in any of these archives could be found from anyone's
desktop worldwide, as if it were all in one virtual public library.
The participants in the meeting were digital librarians and computer
scientists specializing in archiving, metadata, and interoperability, and
they included the founders of the principal public research archives that
exist so far. The participants were diverse in their underlying
motivations, but entirely unified in their objective of paving the way
for universal public archiving of the scientific and scholarly research
literature on the Web.
The group agreed on minimal technical requirements for archives. These
will be published seperately as the "Santa Fe Conventions" and,
in the next six
months, will be implemented in the existing archives.
Technical Summary
The first meeting concentrated on the creation of cross-archive end-user
services. The aim was to try and identify general architectural and
technical characteristics of archive solutions that would facilitate the
creation of such services. These characteristics could then be used as
recommendations for existing and upcoming initiatives.
The meeting started off with a presentation and demonstration by a team
consisting of Herbert Van de Sompel (University of Ghent and Los Alamos
National Laboratory), Michael Nelson (NASA Langley and Old Dominion
University) and Thomas Krichel (University of Surrey and RePEc
initiative). This group had built an experimental end-user service
providing access to data originating from main archive initiatives
(arXiv, RePEc, NCSTRL, NDLTD, NTRS). A variety of technologies were used
in the project, including NCSTRL+ as the digital library service,
intelligent objects called buckets as a means to store the archive
metadata and the SFX linking solution as a means to interlink the eprint
data with the traditional scholarly communication mechanism. The
presentation identified problems that arose during the project, and
discussion of those served to launch the UPS meeting. This presentation
was followed by position papers on interoperability issues presented by
Carl Lagoze (Cornell University), Kurt Maly (Old Dominion University), Ed
Fox (Virginia Tech) and Carolyne Arms (Library of Congress).
Following the initial presentations, there was a panel discussion in
which Paul Ginsparg (Los Alamos National Laboratory), Paul Gherman
(Vanderbilt University), Eric Van de Velde (CalTech) and John Ober
(University of California) expressed their opinion on the possible pros
and cons of institutional versus discipline-oriented archive initiatives.
The UPS group concluded that many different archive initiatives were
likely to emerge, with different conceptual, organizational and technical
foundations. In order for such initiatives to successfully become part of
the scholarly communication system, interoperability was seen as a
crucial factor.
The UPS group agreed that interoperability hinges on a fundamental
distinction between the archive-functions, which include data-collection
and maintenance and end-user functions, like the cross-system search and
linking prototype service described in the opening session. Although
archive initiatives can implement their own end-user services, it is
essential that the archives remain "open" in order to allow
others to equally create such services. This concept was formalized in
the distinction between providers of data (the archive initiatives) and
implementers of data services (the initiatives that want to create
end-user services for archive initiatives). Stimulated by a presentation
by Thomas Krichel, the UPS group agreed that an essential feature of the
Santa Fe Conventions would be that providers of data use a standard
mechanism to state the conditions under which their datasets can be used
by implementers of data services. Similarly, the implementers of data
services could describe the use they make of archive data.
This organizational argument was followed by a discussion on the
technicalities of creating end-user services for data originating from
different archives. The group recognized that there are basically two
ways to implement these: a distributed searching approach and a
harvesting approach. The former would require archives to implement a
joint distributed search protocol, which is not considered to be a
low-entry requirement. Moreover, the technical experts recognized that
there are important problems of scale when implementing such distributed
search solutions, in light of the possible emergence of thousands of
institutional and/or subject-oriented archives worldwide. As such, the
group decided this was not a realistic approach at this point in time.
Therefore, as in the experimental project presented at the beginning of
the meeting, a harvesting solution was proposed. Such a harvesting
solution would allow trusted parties - the ones that subscribe to the
Santa Fe Conventions - to selectively collect data from different
archives. It was identified that such a technique requires an
understanding regarding:
* Protocols to selectively harvest data;
* Criteria that can be used to selectively harvest data;
* Metadata formats that are used by archive solutions to respond to
harvesting requests.
It was recognized that providers of data could describe the details of
these interfaces in standard ways thus enabling implementers of data to
create archive-specific harvesters. Still, the UPS group decided to go
one step further and to highly recommend the following:
* Protocols to selectively harvest data: implementation of part of
the
Dienst protocol in order to achieve a uniform way to poll an
archive
for its logical division(s) (subarchives) and to selectively
harvest
data from these divisions.
* Criteria that can be used to selectively harvest data: there
should
at least be support for a bulk harvest of all data from an
archive,
as well as a mechanism to harvest based on accession date.
Other
harvesting criteria that were thought to be important included
author
affiliation, subject, publication type.
* Metadata formats that are used by archive solutions to respond to
harvesting requests: It is recognized that archives will use
(an)
internal metadata format(s) best suited to deal with the material
to
be described.
Still, the UPS group decided to propose a minimal Dublin Core compliant
metadata set, called the Santa Fe Set, which should be made available by
all archives. It is desirable that archives are able to respond to
harvesting requests with data delivered in both the internal metadata
format as in the Santa Fe Set format.
The representatives of existing archive initiatives at the meeting as
well as those from institutions that are in the process of setting up
archive initiatives agreed to comply to those guidelines. The Dienst
protocol will be enhanced to allow for the functions mentioned above and
a minimal Dienst release facilitating the process of making an archive
compliant to the required aspects of Dienst will be made available. A
transport format for MARC-formatted metadata will be proposed, as well as
an XML DTD for the description of the Santa Fe Set. The recommendations
will be extensively documented on a Web site. Adoption of the
recommendations will be promoted worldwide.
The way forward:
* The minimal Dienst protocol set will be implemented for all
archives
that were represented at the meeting. This will allow for a
first
round of experimentation with the creation of end-user services
layered over existing archives.
* The group identified the urgent need to discuss the mechanisms
used
to submit material to archives.
* Paul Ginsparg suggested that a next meeting should be held in
Europe,
in the first quarter of next year.
* It was also thought to be important to have a presentation and/or
workshop on the UPS Initiative at the ACM 2000 Conference on
Digital
Libraries as well as at the European ECDLC.
* The experimental, non-productional prototype that was presented
at
the meeting will temporarily be available for exploration at
the
beginning of November 1999 at
http://ups.cs.odu.edu/.
The
representatives of Old Dominion University, the Research Library
of
the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of
Ghent
expressed their interest in continuing this prototyping work.
* The UPS Initiative will soon be given a new name and Web site.
get in touch with the UPS initiative by contacting
herbert.vandesompel@rug.ac.be
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