François Paradis

A Descriptive Language for Information Object Reuse through Virtual Documents

The importance of reuse is well recognised for electronic document writing. However, it is rarely achieved satisfactorily because of the complexity of the task: integrating different formats, handling updates of information, addressing document author’s need for intuitiveness and simplicity, etc. In this paper, we present a language for information reuse that allows users to write virtual documents, where dynamic information objects can be retrieved from various sources, transformed, and included along with static information in SGML documents. The language uses a tree-like structure for the representation of information objects, and allows querying without a complete knowledge of the structure or the types of information. The data structures and the syntax of the language are presented through an example application. A major strength of our approach is to treat the document as a non-monolithic set of reusable information objects.

Generating Personal Travel Guides from Discourse Plans

This paper describes a system that delivers travel guides tailored to individual needs. It does so by integrating a discourse planner with a system for querying the web and generating synthesised web pages using document prescriptions. We show by way of example how a user model can lead to a personal travel guide, and show what this might look like in different media. We briefly describe the investigations we are undertaking to determine the utility of such approaches.

A Virtual Document Interpreter for Reuse pf Information

The importance of reuse of information is well recognised for electronic publishing. However, it is rarely achieved satisfactorily because of the complexity of the task: integrating different formats, handling updates of information, addressing the document authors need for intuitiveness and simplicity, etc. An approach which addresses these problems is to dynamically generate and update documents through a descriptive definition of virtual documents. In this paper we present a document interpreter that allows information to be gathered from multiple sources and combined dynamically to produce a virtual document. Two strengths of our approach are: the generic information objects that we use, which enables access to distributed, heterogeneous data sources; and the interpreters evaluation strategy, which permits a minimum of re-evaluation of the information objects from the data sources.

Reuse of Linked Documents through Virtual Document Prescriptions

As the WWW becomes a major source of information, a lot of interest has arisen, not only for searching for information, but for reusing this information in new pages, or directly within applications. Unfortunately HTML tags do not provide a significant level of structure for identifying and extracting information, since they are mostly used for presentation issues. Moreover the simple link mechanism of the Web does not support the controlled traversal of links to related pages. Particularly promising is the proposal for a new standard, XML, which could bring the power of SGML to the Web while keeping the simplicity of HTML. In this paper we present a system and a language that allow reusing of information from various sources, including databases and SGML-like documents, by combining it dynamically to produce a virtual document. The language uses a treelike structure for the representation of the information objects as well as link objects. The paper focuses on the selection and the traversal of XML links to extract information from linked pages. The strength of our approach is to be an SGML-compliant solution, which makes it ready to take full advantage of XML for reusing information from the Web as soon as it is widely used.

Metadata for Photographs: From Digital Library to Multimedia Application

This paper describes the production of an educational multimedia CD-ROM about French rural houses and farms, and how to renovate them without losing their traditional features. The educational message is illustrated with many photographs of non-renovated or renovated houses, and made explicit through comments and descriptions associated with the photos. The paper focuses on the XML metadata describing the photos and the use of this metadata for the automatic generation of Web pages. We first report on the usability of the Dublin Core for interoperable photographs metadata, together with more detailed XML descriptions to support a specific multimedia application. We then show how to generate the Web pages by defining HTML document prescriptions which embed queries to the XML metadata, using Norfolk, a virtual document generator. The approach can be used in various applications ranging from personal virtual photo albums to complex virtual museum.

Customised information delivery: a SIGIR 99 workshop

A major strength of electronic information is the fact that as opposed to its paper counterpart, it can be dynamically modified and tailored to a users need. The problem has been tackled from different angles by different communities. The IR community has revisited its traditional model of query/answers, and now allows for user interaction, synthesized answers, contextual information when presenting answers, etc. The language technology community has designed user models and natural language interfaces to allow better communication and understanding between the system and the user. The Web community has taken a pragmatic approach, with scripts and virtual documents to produce Web pages.

A Task Oriented Approach to Delivery in Mobile Environments

The delivery of Internet content on mobile devices not only poses technological challenges, but also raises usability issues. In this paper, we propose an approach driven by tasks, where a task model is used to dynamically drive the interaction with the user and adapt the content to the device. We argue that such an approach is appropriate given the use of mobile devices for very specific tasks. We present an application to the journalistic domain: we have built a knowledge portal to assist a reporter writing an article. This portal demonstrates how a task model can be used for content adaptation on a mobile device.

Extraction/gathering with the Taylor system (demonstration abstract)

Information Retrieval is often only one step towards the satisfaction of an information need. After a user has retrieved a number of relevant documents, they need to extract information from these resources, and possibly gather information from several in order to satisfy their need. There are several reasons for this: . The resource does not have the right degree of granularity for the information need. . There is no single “good” answer to an information need. . Several resources need to be compared before the information need is fulfilled. This process of extraction/gathering is quite common in traditional library environments; however, some experiments tend to indicate that users of electronic search tools do not readily perform extraction/gathering [1], but rather expect the tool to provide them “ready-to-use” answers. Unfortunately, current information retrieval systems force the user to see their need in terms of topics, and therefore might support some form of extraction, but no gathering.