Leon A. Shklar

InfoHarness: Use of Automatically Generated Metadata for Search and Retrieval of Heterogeneous Information

The InfoHarness system is aimed at providing integrated and rapid access to huge amounts of heterogeneous information independent of its type, representation, and location. This is achieved by extracting metadata and associating it with the original information. The metadata extraction methods ensure rapid and largely automatic creation of information repositories. A stable hierarchy of abstract classes is proposed to organize the processing and representation needs of different kinds of information. An extensible hierarchy of terminal classes simplifies support for new information types and utilization of new indexing technologies. InfoHarness repositories may be accessed through Mosaic or any other HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) compliant browser.

Putting legacy data on the Web: a repository definition language

Abstract The objective of InfoHarness is to provide integrated and rapid access to huge amounts of heterogeneous legacy information through WWW browsers. This is achieved with the help of metadata that contains information about the type, representation, and location of physical data. The proposed InfoHarness Repository Definition Language (IRDL) aims to simplify the metadata generation process. It provides high flexibility in associating typed logical information units with portions of physical data and in defining relationships between these units. The proposed stable abstract class hierarchy provides support for statements of the language that introduce new data types, as well as new indexing technologies.

A high-level visual language for generating Web structures

In earlier work, the authors discussed using data encapsulation to provide integrated access to large amounts of heterogeneous information through WWW browsers. They describe a visual data modeling language which supports the generation of metadata entities to encapsulate raw data. A prototype version of an interpreter for their interactive Visual Repository Definition Language (VRDL) is now operational and may be used for building and maintaining information repositories.

InfoHarness: a system for search and retrieval of heterogeneous information

Enormous amounts of heterogeneous information have been accumulated within corporations, government organizations and universities. It is becoming increasingly easier to create new information, but the knowledge about the existence, location, and means of retrieval of information, have become so confusing as to give rise to the phenomenon of write-only databases.

The Geospatial Interoperability Problem: Lessons Learned from Building the Geolens Prototypye

In 1994 NASA issued a Cooperative Agreement Notice to support new research on digital library technology that would enable broader public use of its Earth science data over the Internet. As a response to this CAN, the Universal Spatial Data Access Consortium (USDAC) was formed and it proposed to prototype the GeoLens system that would not only give broader public access to NASA’s Earth observation data, but also made these data interoperate with other geospatial data served by the Federal government. Part of the challenge of the GeoLens Project has been to decompose the larger geospatial interoperability problem into constituent issues. This chapter will address these issues and describe solutions implemented in our GeoLens prototype. The purpose of this exercise is to support an end-to-end scenario, beginning with geospatial data discovery and ending with conflation of geospatial data extracts from extremely heterogeneous sources. The larger goal is to investigate the opportunity for new information processing standards and innovative digital library technology to play a key role in the realization of this scenario.

Visual Definition of Virtual Documents for the World-Wide Web

Trying to support the presentation of large amounts of heterogeneous data on the World-Wide Web normally results in relocating and restructuring the original data. Our approach avoids these disadvantages by generating metadata imposing an arbitrary logical structure on existing and new data. This paper proposes a new high-level visual language as a userfriendly means to control the process of generating metadata, i.e., information repositories. The language has been designed to be useful even for unexperienced users. Its applicability is demonstrated by a real example, creating a repository of judicial opinions from publicly available raw data.