Tetsuo Sakaguchi

Viewing multilingual documents on your local Web browser

national network, and a multilingual browser is an essential tool for international access to and sharing of global information. The Web has expanded very rapidly worldwide. We can easily access a document from a foreign site using an off-the-shelf browser. However, that browser is usually capable of showing only documents written in English and a local language, not those written in other languages. The principal problem preventing users from browsing documents written in a foreign A new technology allows users to browse multilingual documents on the Internet. language is the lack of both a font for the language and a display function to process multiple character codes. We developed a technology called MHTML to browse multilingual documents on an off-the-shelf Web browser, and applied the technology to a multilingual gateway service to browse foreign documents and to a multilingual electronic text collection of Japanese folk tales [2, 3, 4]. MHTML technology is composed of three elements: The MHTML document object is a package containing a source text string and the minimum set of glyphs required to display the text. An HTML text specified by a URL in an applet tag to invoke the MHTML viewer is converted into an MHTML document object on the fly and sent to the viewer by an MHTML server. (A glyph of a character is a graphical entity used to display or print the character. A minimum set of glyphs for a text is a set of glyphs for all of the distinct characters that appear in the text.) The MHTML viewer, implemented as a Java applet, displays an MHTML document object on a Web browser using only the glyphs enclosed in the object. The MHTML server, with the viewer applet and a font bank, converts an HTML document into MHTML using the glyphs defined in the font bank. The four major advantages of MHTML technology begin with its simple user environment where the user installs only a Java-enabled browser. Secondly, the number of distinct characters used in a source text is much smaller than the total number of characters of the text. We found the ratio between the length of an MTHML document object and its source text was approximately 2:1 to 3:1 in the case of scientific articles written in Japanese. (The source Japanese character is encoded in two bytes. The font glyph is the bitmap data of a character, and its size …

Experimental Studies on an Applet-based Document Viewer for Multilingual WWW Documents - Functional Extension of and Lessons Learned from Multilingual HTML

The World Wide Web (WWW) covers the globe. However, the browsing functions for documents in multiple languages are not easily accessed by occasional users. Functions to display and input multilingual texts in digital libraries are clearly crucial. Multilingual HTML (MHTML)is a document browser technology for multilingual documents on the WWW. The authors developed a display function for multilingual documents based on MHTML technology and extended it to text inputs in multiple languages for off-the-shelf browsers and sample applications. This extension creates an environment for digital library end-users, wherein they can view and search multilingual documents using any off-the-shelf browser. This paper also discusses the lessons learned from the MHTML project.

Building a Multi-lingual Electronic Text Collection of Folk Tales as a Set of Encapsulated Document Objects: An Approach for Casual Users to Browse Multi-lingual Documents on the Fly

Folk tales are an important heritage of every nation. Electronic text collections of folk tales are meaningful information resources for people who wish to learn about foreign cultures and their languages. This paper describes an electronic text collection of old folk tales which was developed using a multilingual document browsing system called the MHTML browser system, a gateway service to help clients access and display WWW documents written in foreign or multiple languages that the client browser cannot display by itself. The MHTML browser system converts a WWW document into a form which contains the source text and the minimum set of font glyphs required to display the text. The converted document object is sent to the client with a set of applets which display the document on the client browser. Since the glyphs are sent to the client from the MHTML gateway, the client does not need to have installed the fonts for the multilingual document, provided that the client is Java-enabled. The folk tale collection currently includes ten old Japanese folk tales. Each tale is written in English, French, and Japanese, and the user can show the three texts of a tale simultaneously on his/her WWW browser, e.g., Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. Thus, a consumer user utilizing an off-the-shelf WWW browser can get a multilingual document on the fly without any additional procedures to set up his/her environment. In this paper, we first discuss the technological background of MHTML and the multilingual browser service for the digital library, as well as the issues involved in building the folk tale collection.

A browsing tool of multi-lingual documents for users without multi-lingual fonts

Since a library is inherently multi-lingual, a multi-linguid document environment is crucial for a digital library. In the near future, worldwide information sharing through digital libraries will be common. Currently, multi-lingual documents are poorly facilitated on computers and the Internet. It is impractical to consider installing fonts for all character sets in every user’s terminal. This paper presents a multilingual document browsing tool for a user with no multilingual fonts on his or her terminal. It discusses several methods for browsing multi-linguaJ documents and proposes a browser which sends a text string with the font glyphs required to display the text. It also gives the evaluation result of the browser.

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.

Concurrent LISP based on lexical scope

A description is given of Concurrent Lisp, which is designed on the basis of lexical scope. It is called lexically scoped concurrent LISP (LS/CL). LS/CL is based on Common LISP. Local variables are lexically scoped and the functions, except for concurrent functions, are defined to satisfy the language specifications of Common LISP. Processes of LS/CL are dynamically created and cooperate with each other. In addition to the language features, this paper shows the environment management mechanism of dynamically activated processes that have statically scoped variables. Also described is the LS/CL system implemented on a workstation.<<ETX>>

Layered architecture of multiple programming language system for multiparadigm programming

A layered architecture that can provide a unified environment for multiparadigm programming on sequential processors is described. The architecture gives open-endedness to a system for programming in multiple languages based on multiple paradigms. Language-specific constructs such as control structures and variable definitions are given in an upper layer. Lower layers describe concepts common to all languages, such as data types and reference protocols. Since communication among languages is handled in the lower layers, the upper layers provide an open-ended abstraction for multiparadigm programming.<<ETX>>

A multimedia knowledge-based system

The multimedia knowledge-based system (MMKS) is a knowledge-based system which provides a uniform environment for flexible human-machine communication using multiple media. MMKS has a knowledge representation method called predicate logic based on objects (PLOB) and an object-base defined based on a relational data model. PLOB is a first-order predicate logic in which every individual is regarded as an object, e.g. an integer, a string, and an image. The object-base is a collection of relations, and a relation is a set of tuples of objects. The management function of the object-base is defined based on SQL. The authors present the definition of MMKS and MMKS systems implemented on workstations.<<ETX>>

CrowdSheet: An Easy-To-Use One-Stop Tool for Writing and Executing Complex Crowdsourcing

Developing crowdsourcing applications with dataflows among tasks requires requesters to submit tasks to crowdsourcing services, obtain results, write programs to process the results, and often repeat this process. This paper proposes CrowdSheet, an application that provides a spreadsheet interface to easily write and execute such complex crowdsourcing applications. We prove that a natural extension to existing spreadsheets, with only two types of new spreadsheet functions, allows us to write a fairly wide range of real-world applications. Our experimental results indicate that many spreadsheet users can easily write complex crowdsourcing applications with CrowdSheet.

Digitization technologies - From the introduction to the application Techniques for producing multimedia contents

マルチメディアコンテンツは，文字，音声，静止画，動画など様々な形態の情報を互いに結び付け，統合した資料である。近年，パーソナルコンピュータやインターネットの普及に伴ってマルチメディア情報を扱うことが身近になっている。本稿では，そのような状況において，実際に音声や静止画，動画などの個々の形態の情報をディジタル化，編集し，最終的にマルチメディアコンテンツとしてまとめあげる手順について述べる。マルチメディア情報を扱うツールは多様で変化も激しいが，個別のツールの使い方ではなく共通の技法について述べている。