Ching-chih Chen

Digital imagery for significant cultural and historical materials

Digital imagery for significant cultural and historical materials is an emerging research field that bridges people, culture, and technologies. In this paper, we first discuss the great importance of this field. Then we focus on its four interrelated subareas: (1) creation and preservation, (2) retrieval, (3) presentation and usability, and (4) applications and use. We propose several mechanisms to encourage collaboration and argue that the field has high potential impact on our digital society. Finally, we make specific recommendations on what to pursue in this field.

The Use Patterns of Physics Journals in a Large Academic Research Library.

The purpose of this investigation was to reveal the use patterns of the physics journals in the M.I.T. Science Library. The findings are based upon an analysis of actual use data recorded from all volumes and issues left by library users on study tables and on trucks in the photocopy area from March 15 to June 31, 1971. The Science Library contains some 220 physics journals. The study reveals that only 138 journals (62.7%) were used even once during the 3 1/2-month interval. A core of 49 journals supplies 90% of use, and these titles would cost 51.5% of the total single subscription costs of the 138 used titles: 52.3% of use occurs in journal volumes less than 6 years old. English is the most used language of physics journals and the English journals account for 95.3% of use. American journals, 57.2% of which are published by the American Institute of Physics, supply 59.4% of the total use.

Using sharable ontology to retrieve historical images

We present a framework of utilizing sharable domain ontology and thesaurus to help the retrieval of historical images of the First Emperor of Chinas terracotta warriors and horses. Incorporating the sharable domain ontology in RDF and RDF schemas of semantic web and a thesaurus, we implement methods to allow easily annotating images into RDF instances and parsing natural language like queries into the query schema in XML format. We also implement a partial structural matching algorithm to match the query schema with images at the level of semantic schemas. Therefore the historical images can be retrieved by naïve users of domain specific history in terms of natural language like queries.

Machine annotation and retrieval for digital imagery of historical materials

Annotating digital imagery of historical materials for the purpose of computer-based retrieval is a labor-intensive task for many historians and digital collection managers. We have explored the possibilities of automated annotation and retrieval of images from collections of art and cultural images. In this paper, we introduce the application of the ALIP (Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures) system, developed at Penn State, to the problem of machine-assisted annotation of images of historical materials. The ALIP system learns the expertise of a human annotator on the basis of a small collection of annotated representative images. The learned knowledge about the domain-specific concepts is stored as a dictionary of statistical models in a computer-based knowledge base. When an un-annotated image is presented to ALIP, the system computes the statistical likelihood of the image resembling each of the learned statistical models and the best concept is selected to annotate the image. Experimental results, obtained using the Emperor image collection of the Chinese Memory Net project, are reported and discussed. The system has been trained using subsets of images and metadata from the Emperor collection. Finally, we introduce an integration of wavelet-based annotation and wavelet-based progressive displaying of very high resolution copyright-protected images.

Multimedia contents and management

Four papers present four different perspectives on the subjects of Indexing, Classification and Search and Retrieval. “A digital library framework for biodiversity information systems”, by Claudia Medeiros and Marcos André Gonçalves, proposes a novel system, combining traditional text retrieval and image retrieval functionalities, which can help biodiversity researchers improve their productivity. The metadata exchange architecture is OAI-PMH compliant, and its effectiveness is demonstrated by experimental results. Still dealing with images, “Machine annotation and retrieval for digital imagery of historical materials”, by James Wang, Kurt Grieb and Ching-chih Chen, presents solutions for machine annotation and retrieval of digital

The president's information technology advisory committee's february 2001 digital library report and its impact

In February 2001 the Panel on Digital Libraries of the Presidents Info rmation Technology Advisory Committee issued a report entitled “Digital Libraries: Universal Access to Human Knowledge”. This JCDL panel, which consists of two members of the PITAC Panel on Digital Libraries and representatives of key Federal science and digital library agencies who had briefed the Panel, will discuss the reports findings and recommendations and how the report is and can be helpful in improving the development and use of digital libraries.