Shigeo Sugimoto

Linking preservation metadata and collection management policies

The long‐term preservation of digital resources is one of the most important issues facing the library community. In particular, libraries need a preservation strategy for digital objects, since digitization alone provides access but not preservation. The digital library community is also focusing on the problem of designing and implementing long‐term archives or repositories. Digital repository management includes the development and enforcement of policies for tasks such as managing access to collection contents and preserving items in the collection. Comprehensive standards and best practices are currently starting to emerge, and ongoing work has deepened the understanding of the needs and requirements that must be met to carry out effective digital preservation. One of these requirements is the creation and maintenance of metadata in support of the preservation process. This paper would like to share findings from earlier and ongoing work that serve as “groundwork” for the current directions leading to the idea of making metadata a more useful and powerful tool to contribute to the technical solution of digital preservation.

A knowledge-based system with audio-visual aids

Abstract A Knowledge-based System with Audio-Visual Aids (KS/AV) is presented. KS/AV is a knowledge-based system that has multiple types of knowledge represented not only in symbols but in audio-visual (AV) images, and it provides an environment for humanmachine communication through AV media. We define a predicate logic based on objects for knowledge representation in KS/AV. It is a first order predicate logic in which every individual is regarded as an object. All of the individuals including AV images are regarded as objects. Their definitions are based on the class concepts of Smalltalk-80. AV image objects presented in this paper include not only simple video and graphic images, but also composite images that consist of several component images. This paper presents the KS/AV system developed on a small computer system with various AV equipment. As a case study, we developed a reading advisory system for children on KS/AV, which communicates with children through AV images and gives their favourite picture books.

A Support Tool for XML Schema Matching and Its Implementation

We are developing a software tool to support schema matching for data transformations. Schema matching is the process of finding relationships between components of two given database schemas. The tool is unique in that it first extracts conceptual schemas from the two database schemas and allows the user to use the extracted conceptual schemas as clues to perform schema matching. This paper overviews the tool and explains its implementation.

A policy-based system for institutional web archiving

Archiving Web content is an important topic for digital libraries and especially for deposit libraries. Web archiving systems usually collect Web resources using search robot software and/or by human labor. However, these resource gathering methods have disadvantages: for example, it is difficult to collect all historical versions of a resource or to collect hidden or dynamic resources. This paper proposes a Web archiving system which is designed to collect resources in accordance with a resource archiving policy determined by the person or organization which provides the resources on the Web. This paper presents the model of the Web archiving system and a prototype system implemented based on the model.

Toward core subject vocabularies for community-oriented subject gateways

Subject classification schemes and vocabularies for subject indexing, i.e. subject vocabularies, have a crucial role in the development of subject gateways. From our experiences on a few subject gateway projects which are designed for regional and domainspecific communities, we learned that the subject gateways require a subject vocabulary which is reasonably small and tailored in accordance with the resources in the domain and the audience. The goal of this paper is to discuss underlying issues for the small core subject vocabularies defined as a subject description/classification scheme for community oriented resources. First, this paper describes some basic aspects for metadata schema and requirements for the region/domain-specific subject gateways. Second, we show three subject gateway projects which are resources designed primarily for libraries and public library users. And then, we show a few examples of small vocabularies designed for regional resources. This paper compares some vocabularies designed for regional resources and discusses issues for the core subject vocabularies. Costs to develop and maintain the vocabularies can not be neglected even if they are small. We consider the Semantic Web technologies will help develop software tools to support development and maintenance of the subject vocabularies and to enhance their interoperability and reusability.

Metadata models toward community-oriented metadata schemas

Metadata has been widely recognized as an important issue in digital libraries in many aspects. This report briefly describes models and frameworks of metadata schemas developed through metadata-centric research projects at University of Tsukuba, which are a few subject gateways and a few metadata schema projects primarily based on Dublin Core and Web technologies.