School of
Information Management & Systems
Previously School of Library & Information Studies
296a-1
Seminar: Information Access.
("The Friday Afternoon Seminar")
Summaries
Fall 2000. Fridays 3-5. 107 South Hall.
Schedule.
Friday Sept 1:
Clifford LYNCH: Introduction. Ebooks and Digital Books.
Recent developments in digital books and electronic
book reading technology, and also the three background
agendas that are implied by all of the hype over "e-books": the
nature of the book in the digital environment; control of
intellectual property and changing relationships between publishers
and consumers; and the possible economic restructuring of the
publishing industry.
Friday Sept 8:
Clifford LYNCH: Authentication, Identity, and Trust in the
Networked Information Environment.
An introduction to Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), a
set of technologies that are used to establish identity in the
digital world, linking these technologies to applications that
include authentication, trust and reputation management. Also
discuss their connections to metadata and search engines.
Friday Sept 15:
Warren SACK: Building Codes: How are Online Conversations Designed?
The recent growth in the number of people with Internet access
has made possible the unprecedented phenomenon of very large-scale
conversations (VLSC) in which hundreds, even thousands, of people
exchange thousands of messages in daily, often international, public,
many-to-many communications. The most obvious manifestations of this
phenomenon are Usenet newsgroups hosted on servers throughout the
Internet and archived by a handful of large sites (e.g., www.deja.com).
I will discuss some ideas from linguistics, sociology, and design useful
for both (a) understanding how participants construct these
conversations; and, (b) how software can be designed to summarize,
visualize, and navigate VLSC.
Sept 22: Michael BUCKLAND and others.
Progress report on vocabulary and metadata projects.
In July 1997, Fredric Gey, Ray Larson and Michael Buckland received funding for a three-year
project entitled
Search Support for Unfamiliar Metadata Vocabularies from the DARPA Information Management Program. The objective was to make online databases easier to search providing an interface capable of accepting a search query in a searcher's vocabulary and convert it into terminology of the index to be searched. In the past year two supplementary grants have been received to extend this work:
Seamless Searching of Numeric and Textual Resources (an IMLS National Library Leadership Project) and
Translingual
Information Management Using Domain Ontologies (in the DARPA TIDES Program), for a
cumulative total over $2 million. What has been done, what is work is in progress,
and future plans will be summarized.
Try
prototypes!
But, first, students taking the seminar for credit will introduce themselves and their topics.
Friday Sept 29: Lewis LANCASTER & Ruth MOSTERN:
The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative.
The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI)
http://www.ias.berkeley.edu/ecai/
is an international cooperative movement by humanities and social science
scholars in many countries to promote the use and sharing of digital
resources coded by place and by date.
ECAI has become a partner of the
California Digital Library. The role of ECAI is to provide a model for
ways in which "eScholarship" can be accomplished. The work that results
from this partnership involves a close collaboration between technical
teams, librarians, and scholars involved in groups dealing with content
issues. At the present more than 400 scholars are involved with ECAI. The
question for discussion will be how to evaluate this approach in the
current state of development of digital materials.
Lewis Lancaster, formerly Head of the Department
of East Asian Languages
and active in the Graduate Group in Buddhist Studies,
retired last July to concentrate on his work as Director of ECAI,
which is, administratively, an academic program in International and
Area Studies.
Friday Oct 6: Students and Clifford LYNCH: Reports.
Lincoln CUSHING: Protection of Digital Images on the Web.
As more and more intermediary institutions (such as digital libraries)
decide to put digital images up on the Web, content protection becomes a
significant concern. The thrill of making full-color pictures available
to researchers all over the world quickly fades when those same images
are hijacked for inappropriate and unauthorized uses.
Legal and ethical obligations.
Technical methods available for controlling end-user image
access.
Bibi EPHRAIM: Medical Information for and from Remote Corners
in sub-Saharan Africa.
A brief look at the challenges and promise of information technology in
accessing current medical information.
Joan GARVIN & Deborah RANDOLPH: Cross disciplinary multi-media
Web displays.
Information pertaining to the storage and Web displays of multi-media (sound, images, and text), and different disciplines. Metadata standards (such as CDWA, CIMI, and VRA Core
categories), application of those standards to similar projects (VISION,
CHIO), and standards for the synchronized display of data (SMIL).
Alvin KURNIAWAN: An analysis of Data Mining in e-commerce.
What is data mining? Uses of data mining in e-commerce. What kind of problems are data mining trying to solve. Techniques used in data mining. Brief Comparison of 2 data mining software. Advantages of data mining vs. statistical software. Future trends.
Kirsten SWEARINGEN: Disintermediation in the
news media.
How, as news sources move online, the journalist's
traditional role of "gatekeeper" is (or is not) changing.
Clifford LYNCH: Selected Recent Developments.
Friday Oct 13: Richard J. Goodram:
Life After Conversion.
Born again collections present new problems and new opportunities.
An enormous wealth of informational
(and recreational) materials that are becoming available as vast
"virtual collections". These vast collections increase the size of
their indexes in an exponential way as we apply finer indexing
techniques. This combination of rapidly increasing "collection" size
and even faster increasing size of index files produces a need for
individualized retrieval techniques. I will then propose some
approaches to this problem.
Friday Oct 20: Clifford LYNCH: Benchmark Databases for Image
Retrieval.
I want to brainstorm about benchmark databases for image
retrieval, particularly in art and related areas.
Also students' progress reports, including:
Allen Giles: The Industrial Light and Magic Stock Elements collection.
Friday Oct 27: Clifford LYNCH: Reports of recent developments.
Also students' progress reports, including:
Joan GARVIN & Deborah RANDOLPH: Cross disciplinary multi-media
Web displays.
Information pertaining to the storage and Web displays of
multi-media (sound, im
ages, and text), and different disciplines. Metadata standards
(such as CDWA, CIMI,
and VRA Core
categories), application of those standards to similar projects (VISION,
CHIO), and standards for the synchronized display of data (SMIL).
Alvin KURNIAWAN: An analysis of Data Mining in e-commerce.
What is data mining? Uses of data mining in e-commerce. What kind of problems
are data mining trying to solve. Techniques used in data mining. Brief Compariso
n of 2 data mining software. Advantages of data mining vs. statistical software.
Future trends.
Kirsten SWEARINGEN: Disintermediation in the
news media.
How, as news sources move online, the journalist's
traditional role of "gatekeeper" is (or is not) changing.
Friday Nov 3: Roger SUMMIT: DIALOG as a
Case Study in the Development of a Commercial Online Service; and
Current Trends.
DIALOG as a case study in the development of a
commercial online service.
Current technology trends and where they are taking us.
The Internet and its impact on the professional information community.
Technical considerations in the design of the Dialog search engine.
Discussion of how contemporary search engines differ in design.
Elaboration and discussion of any previous points.
For background see
http://www.libsci.sc.edu/bob/ISP/summit2.htm.
Friday Nov 10: Veteran's Day: ** NO seminar.**
Friday Nov 17: Fred Gey, UCDATA:
Recent Developments in Cross-Language Information Retrieval.
This talk will review some recent research in cross-language
information retrieval, both here at Berkeley and other places
around the world. I will talk about the European language
CLEF (Cross Language Evaluation Forum) workshop, English-Chinese
retrieval at TREC-9 and the Japanese Government's NTCIR
workshop, as well as our own TIDES work with the Indian
subcontinent language of Tamil. Some comments will also be
made about our desire to approach Cyrillic based languages in
Asia Minor (Uzbek, Tajik, Kazak) through transliteration.
Friday Nov 24: Thanksgiving: No seminar.
Friday Dec 1: Lincoln CUSHING and Clifford LYNCH.
Lincoln CUSHING: Protecting Digital Images on the Web.
Any sharing or display of digital images on the World Wide Web poses a
risk for inappropriate copying and use. Given the ease with which
material can be swiped off the screen and the huge numbers of people
clicking through websites, is it reasonable and appropriate for
institutions such as libraries, galleries, and museums to post anything
at all? I would suggest that the answer is a qualified yes; the
benefits far outweigh the dangers if the hosting institution truly
understands the issues and diligently adopts a methodology for
protecting digitally-published images. This presentation surveys the
various options available for these legal and technical protections.
Clifford LYNCH: Report on Recent Developments.
Selected recent developments, including an update on the Open Archives Initiative and related issues in metadata
harvesting, including a look back at some of the key ideas of the
original Harvest system and how they are re-emerging in the work of
the OAI.
Dec 8:
Seminar postponed to Dec 15.
Dec 15: Additional seminar meeting: Student's reports:
- Bibi EPHRAIM: Medical Information for and
from sub-Saharan Africa.
This presentation explores some of the challenges and technological
opportunities in providing current medical information to medical
professional in remote parts of sub-Saharan Africa and in obtaining
medical intelligence from these regions.
- Joan GARVIN & Deborah RANDOLPH: Multi-media Displays of Information.
We have been
researching metadata for use in storing, searching and displaying
multi-media information, including music, art and text. Borrowing from some
of the standards examined, we hope to
develop our own metadata structure.
We have also been examining ways to display that information, including
the pros and cons of various methods. The presentation includes actual
working examples of our efforts: creating and using MIDI and RealAudio
files for the display of music, and working with MacroMedia Flash and SMIL
(Structured Multimedia Integration
Language) to develop animated presentations related to that music.
- Alvin KURNIAWAN: Data Mining:
Knowledge Finding in Information Access.
I will talk briefly about what data mining is, its application and the
basic concept of Knowledge Finding/Discovery in text-based
information retrieval.
How Knowledge Finding differs from traditional text-based search
engine/information retrieval systems.
I will show an online demonstration of how information from
Knowledge Finding
is represented and how Knowledge Finding software works.
- Kirsten SWEARINGEN: The New News Intermediaries.
I will present the results of my exploratory study of online
news sources and consider the impact of the new news
intermediaries: How is access to the news now being controlled,
promoted, and channelled? Topics to be discussed include content
hypersyndication, new technologies mediating access to news online, and
issues of subject access, in particular the impact of news channel
categorization structures.
Spring 2000 summaries.
Spring 2001 summaries.