Costantino Thanos

Digital Libraries: Research and Development

Similarity Search.- MESSIF: Metric Similarity Search Implementation Framework.- Image Indexing and Retrieval Using Visual Terms and Text-Like Weighting.- Architectures.- A Reference Architecture for Digital Library Systems: Principles and Applications.- DelosDLMS - The Integrated DELOS Digital Library Management System.- ISIS and OSIRIS: A Process-Based Digital Library Application on Top of a Distributed Process Support Middleware.- An Architecture for Sharing Metadata Among Geographically Distributed Archives.- Integration of Reliable Sensor Data Stream Management into Digital Libraries.- Personalization.- Content-Based Recommendation Services for Personalized Digital Libraries.- Integrated Authoring, Annotation, Retrieval, Adaptation, Personalization, and Delivery for Multimedia.- Gathering and Mining Information from Web Log Files.- Interoperability.- Modelling Intellectual Processes: The FRBR - CRM Harmonization.- XS2OWL: A Formal Model and a System for Enabling XML Schema Applications to Interoperate with OWL-DL Domain Knowledge and Semantic Web Tools.- A Framework and an Architecture for Supporting Interoperability Between Digital Libraries and eLearning Applications.- Evaluation.- An Experimental Framework for Interactive Information Retrieval and Digital Libraries Evaluation.- The Importance of Scientific Data Curation for Evaluation Campaigns.- An Approach for the Construction of an Experimental Test Collection to Evaluate Search Systems that Exploit Annotations.- Evaluation and Requirements Elicitation of a DL Annotation System for Collaborative Information Sharing.- INEX 2002 - 2006: Understanding XML Retrieval Evaluation.- Miscellaneous.- Task-Centred Information Management.- Viewing Collections as Abstractions.- Adding Multilingual Information Access to the European Library.- The OntoNL Framework for Natural Language Interface Generation and a Domain-Specific Application.- Preservation.- Evaluating Preservation Strategies for Electronic Theses and Dissertations.- Searching for Ground Truth: A Stepping Stone in Automating Genre Classification.- Video Data Management.- Video Transcoding and Streaming for Mobile Applications.- Prototypes Selection with Context Based Intra-class Clustering for Video Annotation with Mpeg7 Features.- Automatic, Context-of-Capture-Based Categorization, Structure Detection and Segmentation of News Telecasts.- 3D Objects.- Description, Matching and Retrieval by Content of 3D Objects.- 3D-Mesh Models: View-Based Indexing and Structural Analysis.- Similarity-Based Retrieval with MPEG-7 3D Descriptors: Performance Evaluation on the Princeton Shape Benchmark.- Peer to Peer.- Application of the Peer-to-Peer Paradigm in Digital Libraries.- Efficient Search and Approximate Information Filtering in a Distributed Peer-to-Peer Environment of Digital Libraries.- Management of and Access to Virtual Electronic Health Records.

A vision towards Scientific Communication Infrastructures

The two pillars of the modern scientific communication are Data Centers and Research Digital Libraries (RDLs), whose technologies and admin staff support researchers at storing, curating, sharing, and discovering the data and the publications they produce. Being realized to maintain and give access to the results of complementary phases of the scientific research process, such systems are poorly integrated with one another and generally do not rely on the strengths of the other. Today, such a gap hampers achieving the objectives of the modern scientific communication, that is, publishing, interlinking, and discovery of all outcomes of the research process, from the experimental and observational datasets to the final paper. In this work, we envision that instrumental to bridge the gap is the construction of “Scientific Communication Infrastructures”. The main goal of these infrastructures is to facilitate interoperability between Data Centers and RDLs and to provide services that simplify the implementation of the large variety of modern scientific communication patterns.

Paving the Way for Interoperability in Digital Libraries: The DL.org Project

While Digital Libraries are working towards making universally accessible collections of human knowledge a reality, considerable advances are needed in Digital Libraries methodologies and technologies to make this happen. Achieving interoperability between Digital Libraries is a crucial requirement for reaching this goal. Interoperability is a multi-layered and context-specific concept. It encompasses different levels along a multidimensional spectrum ranging from organisational to technological aspects. Addressing the interoperability challenges is the prime goal of the DL.org project. DL.org is advancing the state of the art in this area, and is proposing solutions for interoperability in addition to best practices and shared standards, bringing together knowledge from the DELOS project and expertise of Digital Library stakeholders. To achieve its objectives, the project is looking at the DELOS Digital Library Reference Model and investigating interoperability from the viewpoint of the six fundamental Digital Library concepts: Content, User, Functionality, Quality, Policy, and Architecture. Our paper describes the results of DL.org research, and how the project is addressing the interoperability challenge from the perspectives of the six domains. Relevant Digital Library interoperability aspects will be described, from conceptualisation at a high organisational level to instantiation at process level, and modelling techniques for representing and enabling interoperability between heterogeneous digital library mediation approaches, methods, and systems. By pursuing the interoperability goal, DL.org is paving the way forward for embedding new research achievements into real-world systems, and is supporting the advancement of research and the creation of a European Information Space for the knowledge-based economy.

DESIRE 2011: workshop on data infrastructurEs for supporting information retrieval evaluation

This paper reports on the Data infrastructurEs for Supporting Information Retrieval Evaluation DESIRE 2011 Workshop [3, 4] held on 28 October 2011 in conjunction with the 20th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), Glasgow, UK. Information Retrieval has a strong and long tradition dating back to the 1960s in producing and processing scientific data resulting from the experimental evaluation of search algorithms and search systems [8]. This attitude towards evaluation has led to fast and continuous progress in the evolution of information retrieval systems and search engines. However, in order to make the data test collections, that are used in the context of the evaluation activities, understandable and usable they must be endowed with some auxiliary information, i.e., provenance, quality, context. Therefore, there is a need for metadata models able to describe the main characteristics of evaluation data. In addition, in order to make distributed data collections accessible, sharable, and interoperable, there is a need for advanced data infrastructures. In contrast, the information retrieval area has barely explored and exploited the possibilities for managing, storing, and effectively accessing the scientific data produced during the evaluation studies by making use of the methods typical of the database and knowledge management areas. Over the years, the information retrieval area has produced a vast set of large test collections which have become the main benchmark tools of the area and contribute to reproducible and comparable experiments [2]. However, these same collections have not been organised into coherent and integrated infrastructures which make them accessible, searchable, citable, exploitable, and re-usable to all possibly interested researchers, developers, and user communities [1].

DESIRE 2011: first international workshop on data infrastructures for supporting information retrieval evaluation

The workshop focuses on the three areas of interest to CIKM to discuss how to envisage and design evaluation infrastructures able to store, manage, and make accessible the scientific data and knowledge of interest for advancing the evaluation of information retrieval and access tools. Main goal is to understand how to make use of the expertise of the three scientific areas in a cooperative way to avoid the duplication of efforts which may occur when addressing the problem separately in each specific area and to trigger synergies and joint actions on the issue. Main purposes of the workshop are the identification of a roadmap and the definition of initial best practices to guide the development of the necessary evaluation infrastructures.

An open collaborative virtual archive environment

Cyclades is a system that combines several technologies from the information retrieval and digital library fields, where users and user communities may deal with a rather large set of heterogeneous digital archives. Cyclades provides a highly personalized environment where users may organize (and search) information space according to individual taste and use; in addition, Cyclades provides advanced features of collaborative work among users.

Making Digital Library Content Interoperable

The demand for powerful and rich Digital Libraries able to support a large variety of interdisciplinary activities has increased the need for “building by re-use” and sharing, especially when dealing with the content space. Interoperability is a central issue to satisfy these needs. Despite its importance, and the many attempts to address it done in the past, the solutions to this problem are today, however, still very limited. Main reasons for this slow progress are lack of any systematic approach for addressing the issue and scarce knowledge of the adopted solutions. Too often these remain confined to the systems they have been designed for. In order to overcome this lack, this paper proposes an Interoperability Framework for describing and analyzing interoperability problems and solutions related to use of content resources. It also discusses the many facets content interoperability has and provides a comprehensive and annotated portfolio of existing approaches and solutions to this challenging issue.

OpenDLib: an infrastructure for new generation digital libraries

This paper presents OpenDLib, a digital library infrastructure that provides capabilities for new-generation digital libraries. In particular, the paper introduces a document model that can be used to represent a wide variety of document types and describes the open architectural infrastructure that allows for the expansion of the digital library through the dynamic plugin of new services.

An Optimal Predicate Locking Scheduler

The paper presents a predicate locking scheduler that maximizes concurrency by locking as many of the database entities as possible without compromising the correctness of execution of the database transactions. The scheduling strategy that guarantees the maximal concurrency is first identified, then a predicate language allowing an efficient implementation of this strategy is given. The optimal predicate locking scheduler is successively presented, based on a lattice-theoretic formalization of the underlying concepts. Finally, the range of applicability of the optimal scheduling strategy is circumscribed, by showing that any significant extension to the expressive power of the predicate language accepted by the optimal scheduler causes an irreparable loss of efficiency.

An Event-Centric Provenance Model for Digital Libraries

Provenance is intended as the description of the origin and/or of the descendant line of data. In the last decade, keeping track of provenance has become crucial for the correct exploitation of data in a wide variety of application domains. The rapid evolution of digital libraries, which have become today advanced systems for the integration and management of cross-domain digital objects, recently called for models capturing the aspects of data provenance in this application field. However, there is no common definition of digital library provenance and existing solutions address the problem only from the perspective of specific application scenarios. In this paper we propose a provenance model for digital libraries, inspired by approaches and experiences in the e-Science and cultural heritage worlds and based on the notion of event occurred to an object. The model aims at capturing the specificities of provenance for digital libraries objects in order to provide practitioners and researchers in the field with common DL-specific provenance description languages.