Bob Martens

Cumulative Index of CAAD: Current Status and Future Directions

This article discusses the Cumulative Index of CAAD (CUMINCAD.SciX.net) – a digital library set up in 1998 serving the CAAD-community as an important source of scientific information. During the first stage, the metadata of CAAD-related conference proceedings were compiled and published on-line, including all abstracts and approximately 50 % of the full-texts. In a subsequent step a Citation Index was created. Currently, theses and dissertations are being added to the library. Furthermore, a hierarchical topic structure was developed for automated classification of publications in the future, with topics being defined by keywords and characteristic papers. The next version of CUMINCAD, expected to be released later this year, will also feature a discussion forum, an event calendar, an option for commenting on and ranking publications as well as creating an on-line personal bibliographic review. CUMINCAD is a unique digital library in the field of CAAD serving a growing user-community. Younger doctoral degree students and junior researchers will benefit most from this edited, structured collection freely available via Internet.

Re-engineering the scientific knowledge management process: the SciX project

Abstract In the past, paper-based publications were both the medium for the information exchange among the scientists as well as the measure of their scientific quality. Recently electronic publication is increasingly important for the dissemination of scientific work, while evaluation of scientists and institutions remains largely based on the printed publications. In the “material world”, associations, such as eCAADe have been providing a stage for getting the right people together and through annual conferences and seminars made sure that research results were heard and read. The Internet and the Web are allowing the scientists to pursue those activities on their own or through flexibly organized “virtual” associations. Electronic publications also provide a basis for efficient management of scientific knowledge—discovering related work, reduction of the duplicate efforts, establishment of virtual research teams etc. In this paper, we present the goals and initial results of an EU-project called SciX: “Open, Self Organising Repository for Scientific Information Exchange”. The goal of SciX is to analyze the business processes of scientific publishing, to invent new publication models and through a series of pilots to demonstrate how this will work. In the envisioned scenarios, professional associations such as eCAADe play an important role. Their members are the potential users of SciXs platforms, authors and readers of the papers. Associations could also become the publishers and archivists of the knowledge created within their respective community. The objectives of this contribution focus on involving the eCAADe-community in the developments in SciX, on fine-shaping the goals, as well as on defining the requirements and monitoring the usability of the pilots.

A Long-Term Scope of Actions for Reconstructed Cultural Heritage: Maintaining a Virtual Archive of Non-existing Synagogues

Reconstruction work on more than twenty synagogues in Vienna has been ongoing for more than a decade. The fact that these sacred buildings no longer exist is a pivotal aspect in this undertaking. Research revealed archived material, however, which served as reliable basis for the reconstruction work. The authors discuss details of the process of handling archival research as well as the decision-making process during reconstruction. The paper focuses on the possibilities and limits of this exploration and discusses the long-term options of handling 3D models, also in the light of continuous changes in the software environments used. The dissemination of results to a large audience and the appropriate illustration of spatial contexts is another aspect that has been explored. The publication of results in the form of a city guide is in line with the objective of conveying the reconstruction results to a large audience.

On the Archiving of Tom Mavers' Bibliography (1969-)

Professor Tom Maver has authored and co-authored nearly 150 publications in the course of his academic career so far. A substantial part of this work has been collected in a paper-based format and most of this has now been converted to a digital format. The bibliographical citations have been recorded – together with digital full paper versions – in CUMINCAD (Cumulative Index on CAD – http://cumincad.SciX.net). A closer examination of the collected archive of these publications and their global impact will be given in this contribution. Finally, a brief outline of possible future work will be presented.

Digital CAADRIA-proceedings: retrospective analysis of content

This contribution issues an overview of the frame conditions for the utilization of Digital CAADRIA Proceedings representing in its entirety an important asset for the CAADcommunity. The process of the extended use of electronic copies of CAADRIA conference papers in pdf-format is described as well as the respective decisions taken in this context. Results of a content analysis regarding the topics of CAAD and referencing are presented.

The Topics of CAAD

Ontology of a scientific field typically includes a taxonomy that breaks up the field into several topics. The break-up is present in the organisation of information in books, libraries and on the Web. An on-line database of papers related to CAAD called CUMINCAD was created and it includes over 3000 papers with abstracts. They are available through the search interface - one knows an author or a keyword and can find the papers where such keyword or author’s name appears. Alternative interface would be through browsing papers topic by topic. The papers, however, are not categorised. In this paper, we present the efforts to use the machine learning and data mining techniques to automatically group the papers into clusters and create a set of keywords that would label a cluster. The hypothesis was that an algorithm would create clusters of papers automatically and that the clusters would be similar to the groupings a human would have made. We investigated several algorithms for doing an analysis like that but were unable to prove the original hypothesis. We conclude that it requires more than objective statistical analysis of the words in abstracts to create an ontology of CAAD.