Adam Farquhar

The Ontolingua Server

Reusable ontologies are becoming increasingly important for tasks such as information integration, knowledge-level interoperation and knowledge-base development. We have developed a set of tools and services to support the process of achieving consensus on commonly shared ontologies by geographically distributed groups. These tools make use of the World Wide Web to enable wide access and provide users with the ability to publish, browse, create and edit ontologies stored on anontology server. Users can quickly assemble a new ontology from a library of modules. We discuss how our system was constructed, how it exploits existing protocols and browsing tools, and our experience supporting hundreds of users. We describe applications using our tools to achieve consensus on ontologies and to integrate information.The Ontolingua Server may be accessed through the URLhttp://ontolingua.stanford.edu

Distributed repositories of highly expressive reusable ontologies

The authors present a vision of next-generation tools and services that will enable the widespread development and use of computer-interpretable ontologies. Central to their vision is the notion of distributed ontology repositories that use a network application programming interface for ontology servers.

Planets: Integrated Services for Digital Preservation

The Planets Project is developing services and technology to address core challenges in digital preservation. This article introduces the motivation for this work, describes the extensible technical architecture and places the Planets approach into the context of the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model. It also provides a scenario demonstrating Planets’ usefulness in solving real-life digital preservation problems and an overview of the project’s progress to date.

Significance is in the eye of the stakeholder

Custodians of digital content take action when the material that they are responsible for is threatened by, for example, obsolescence or deterioration. At first glance, ideal preservation actions retain every aspect of the original objects with the highest level of fidelity. Achieving this goal can, however, be costly, infeasible, and sometimes even undesirable. As a result, custodians must focus their attention on preserving the most significant characteristics of the content, even at the cost of sacrificing less important ones. The concept of significant characteristics has become prominent within the digital preservation community to capture this key goal. As is often the case in an emerging field, however, the term has become over-loaded and remains ill-defined. In this paper, we unpack the meaning that lies behind the phrase, analyze the domain, and introduce clear terminology.

Putting the Problem Solver Back in the Driver's Seat: Contextual Control of the AMTS

The Atms is a powerful tool for automated problem solvers and has been used to support several model-based reasoning tasks such as prediction and diagnosis. It provides an efficient mechanism for maintaining consistent sets of beliefs and recording the assumptions underlying them. This enables the problem solver to switch rapidly between contexts and compare them. Such capabilities are central to diagnostic systems, and are also valuable to design and planning systems. Applications to larger problems have been hampered, however, by the problem solvers inability to maintain control over the Atms.

Building a large knowledge base from a structured source

To exploit the value of knowledge-rich documents online, they must be transformed into large-scale knowledge bases. The authors describe their experiences in creating such a knowledge base from the Central Intelligence Agencys World Fact Book which contains geographical, economic, and sociological facts about countries and territories of the world.

Problem Solver Control Over the ATMS

The ATMS is a powerful tool for automated problem solvers. It provides an efficient mechanism for maintaining consistent sets of beliefs and recording the assumptions underlying them. This enables the problem solver to switch rapidly between contexts and compare them. Applications to larger problems have been hampered, however, by the problem solver’s inability to maintain control over theATMS.

Modelling Organizational Preservation Goals to Guide Digital Preservation

Summary This paper is an extended and updated version of the work reported at iPres 2008. Digital preservation activities can only succeed if they go beyond the technical properties of digital objects. They must consider the strategy, policy, goals, and constraints of the institution that undertakes them and take into account the cultural and institutional framework in which data, documents and records are preserved. Furthermore, because organizations differ in many ways, a one-size-fits-all approach cannot be appropriate. Fortunately, organizations involved in digital preservation have created documents describing their policies, strategies, work-flows, plans, and goals to provide guidance. They also have skilled staff who are aware of sometimes unwritten considerations. Within Planets (Farquhar & Hockx-Yu, 2007), a four-year project co-funded by the European Union to address core digital preservation challenges, we have analyzed preservation guiding documents and interviewed staff from libraries, archives, and data centres that are actively engaged in digital preservation. This paper introduces a conceptual model for expressing the core concepts and requirements that appear in preservation guiding documents. It defines a specific vocabulary that institutions can reuse for expressing their own policies and strategies. In addition to providing a conceptual framework, the model and vocabulary support automated preservation planning tools through an XML representation 1 .

Approach for a joint global registration agency for research data

The scientific and information communities have largely mastered the presentation of, and linkages between, text-based electronic information by assigning persistent identifiers to give scientific literature unique identities and accessibility. Knowledge, as published through scientific literature, is often the last step in a process originating from scientific research data. Today scientists are using simulation, observational, and experimentation techniques that yield massive quantities of research data. These data are analyzed, synthesized, interpreted, and the outcome of this process is generally published as a scientific article. Access to the original data as the foundation of knowledge has become an important issue throughout the world and different projects have started to find solutions. Global collaboration and scientific advances could be accelerated through broader access to scientific research data. In other words, data access could be revolutionized through the same technologies used to make textual literature accessible. The most obvious opportunity to broaden visibility of and access to research data is to integrate its access into the medium where it is most often cited: electronic textual information. Besides this opportunity, it is important, irrespective of where they are cited, for research data to have an internet identity. Since 2005, the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) has offered a successful Digital Object Identifier (DOI) registration service for persistent identification of research data. In this white paper we discuss the possibilities to open this registration to a global consortium of information institutes and libraries.

Implementing Metadata that Guide Digital Preservation Services

Effective digital preservation depends on a set of preservation services that work together to ensure that digital objects can be preserved for the long-term. These services need digital preservation metadata, in particular, descriptions of the properties that digital objects may have and descriptions of the requirements that guide digital preservation services. This paper analyzes how these services interact and use these metadata and develops a data dictionary to support them.