Michael Ley

The DBLP Computer Science Bibliography: Evolution, Research Issues, Perspectives

Publications are essential for scientific communication. Access to publications is provided by conventional libraries, digital libraries operated by learned societies or commercial publishers, and a huge number of web sites maintained by the scientists themselves or their institutions. Comprehensive meta-indices for this increasing number of information sources are missing for most areas of science. The DBLP Computer Science Bibliography of the University of Trier has grown from a very specialized small collection of bibliographic information to a major part of the infrastructure used by thousands of computer scientists. This short paper first reports the history of DBLP and sketches the very simple software behind the service. The most time-consuming task for the maintainers of DBLP may be viewed as a special instance of the authority control problem: how to normalize different spellings of person names. The third section of the paper discusses some details of this problem which might be an interesting research issue for the information retrieval community.

DBLP: some lessons learned

The DBLP Computer Science Bibliography evolved from an early small experimental Web server to a popular service for the computer science community. Many design decisions and details of the public XML-records behind DBLP never were documented. This paper is a review of the evolution of DBLP. The main perspective is data modeling. In DBLP persons play a central role, our discussion of person names may be applicable to many other data bases. All DBLP data are available for your own experiments. You may either download the complete set, or use a simple XML-based API described in an online appendix.

Analysing social networks within bibliographical data

Finding relationships between authors and thematic similar publications is getting harder and harder due to the mass of information and the rapid growth of the number of scientific workers. The io-port.net portal and the DBLP Computer Science Bibliography including more than 2,000,000 and 750,000 publications, respectively, from more than 450,000 authors are major services used by thousands of computer scientists which provides fundamental support for scientists searching for publications or other scientists in similar communities. In this paper, we describe a user–friendly interface which plays the central role in searching authors and publications and analysing social networks on the basis of bibliographical data. After introducing the concept of multi-mode social networks, the DBL–Browser itself and various methods for multi-layered browsing through social networks are described.

Managing the quality of person names in DBLP

Quality management is, not only for digital libraries, an important task in which many dimensions and different aspects have to be considered. The following paper gives a short overview on DBLP in which the data acquisition and maintenance process underlying DBLP is discussed from a quality point of view. The paper finishes with a new approach to identify erroneous person names.

Browsing and visualizing digital bibliographic data

Access to publications is provided by conventional libraries, digital libraries operated by learned societies or commercial publishers, and a huge number of web sites maintained by the scientists themselves or their institutions. But comprehensive meta-indices in combination with a helpful graphical user interface for this increasing number of information sources are missing for most areas of science. Our DBLP (Digital Bibliography & Library Project) Computer Science Bibliography is a major service used by thousands of computer scientists. It provides fundamental support for scientists searching for publications or other scientists in similar communities. For better assistance we developed a new browser prototype which has a user-friendly interface and plays a central role in the search and browsing of the data. The DBL-Browser provides smart search functions and several textual and graphical visualization models. This paper gives an overview of some important research issues within the field of bibliographical information retrieval and visualization. After introducing the whole framework, the DBL-Browser itself and various visualization models are described.

Die Trierer Informatik-Bibliographie DBLP

Der leichte Zugang zu aktueller und qualitativ hochwertiger Fachinformation ist auch in der Informatik essentiell fur Lehre, Forschung und Entwicklung. Die wichtigsten Medien zur Verbreitung wissenschaftlicher Informationen sired in der Informatik Tagungen, Tagungsbande, Zeitschriften und in zunehmendem Mase das Internet. Neben Preprint-Servern spielen auf derv Internet themenzentrierte Web-Server fur Teilgebiete der Informatik eine immer wichtigere Rolle.

Multi-Layered browsing and visualisation for digital libraries

For a scientific researcher it is more and more vital to find relevant publications with their correct bibliographical data, not only for accurate citations but particularly for getting further information about their current research topic. This paper describes a new approach to develop user-friendly interfaces: Multi-Layered-Browsing. Two example applications are introduced that play a central role in searching, browsing and visualising bibliographical data.

The term retrieval abstract machine

Scans through large collections of complex objects often cannot be avoided. Even if sohphisticated indexing mechanisms are provided, it may be necessary to evaluate simple predicates against data stored on disk for filtering. For traditional record oriented data models i/o and buffer management are the main bottlenecks for this operation, the interpretation of data structures is straightforward and usually not an important cost factor. For heterogeneously shaped complex objects it may become a dominant cost factor. In this paper we demonstrate a technique to make data structure traversal inside of complex objects much cheaper than naive interpretation. We compile navigation necessary to evaluate condition predicates and physical schema information into a program to be executed by a specialized abstract machine. Our approach is demonstrated for the Feature Term Data Model (FTDM), but the technique is applicable to many other complex data models. Main parts of this paper are dedicated to the method we used to design the Term Retrieval Abstract Machine (TRAM) architecture by partial evaluation of a tuned interpreter.