Issue 5 : March 2006 |
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Issue 5 |
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Editorial | ||
As you will see in this issue of the DELOS Newsletter, there is coverage of a number of different events ranging from the large-scale ECDL 2005 in Vienna to much smaller affairs but no less important in what they have set out to achieve. Nonetheless I cannot but wish to highlight for readers the significance of what was envisaged in the brainstorming meeting at the beginning of December. The necessary steps towards a European Digital library as highlighted by Horst Forster and other presenters will not necessarily surprise practitioners within the DELOS Network of Excellence but the ultimate information space they presage and the research and development they will require are of paramount importance to us all. On a lighter note, we also note with interest the promising work evident at ECDL 2005 and acknowledge the efforts not only of its award winners and contributors but also the successful exchanges of researchers, and of course pay homage to the DELOS members who have been so hospitable and encouraging towards their visiting colleagues. If you have an item to contribute for the next issue, however small or large, do not hesitate to contact the editor at r.waller@ukoln.ac.uk Costantino Thanos
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ECDL 2005 |
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Over 18-23 September 2005, around 400 researchers and practitioners met in Vienna, Austria for the 9th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL 2005). The conference offered a fascinating and varied programme, starting with a set of six tutorials on the Sunday, covering general concepts and formal frameworks for digital libraries, context-enhanced digital library services, thesauri and ontologies in digital libraries, building digital library collections with Greenstone and DL interoperability standards. The imposing exterior of the Austrian National Library by night and venue for the welcome reception of ECDL 2005 Tutorials were followed by a dense two-and-a-half-day programme of presentations. Keynote speakers were Neil Beagrie (British Library and the Joint Information System Council, UK) who addressed the potential of personal digital libraries, considering specifically the massive amounts of data that are and will be collected by the population at large as part of their day-to-day life, and the resulting potential of, and consequences for, personal information systems. The second keynote by Erich Neuhold (former head of Fraunhofer-IPSI, now at Vienna University of Technology) picked up this topic and pointed out future directions in DL development, focusing particularly on the promises and challenges of integrating and combining DL, peer-to-peer and GRID technologies. The quality of the presentations, held in two parallel sessions, was excellent, with only 32% of all papers submitted to the conference having been accepted for presentation. In addition to the presentations ECDL featured two panels. Donatella Castelli discussed with a prominent group of panellists one of the key messages addressed in the second keynote, namely whether digital libraries on the GRID will turn out to be heaven or hell; Tamara Sumner in her panel attempted to answer the question whether e-science needs digital libraries. The whole range of current digital library research as well as project activities was presented in a poster session, featuring research posters and application demos, as well as current project activities of the DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries (DELOS). Furthermore, a large group of PhD students had the chance to present and discuss their work not only within the ECDL Doctoral Consortium, but also with the whole ECDL community as part of the poster session. Following the main conference programme, ECDL was rounded off with a set of well-attended workshops. CLEF, the cross-language evaluation forum, drew more than 100 participants during its two-and-a-half days of presentations and evaluation sessions. IWAW, the ECDL Workshop on Web Archiving and Digital Preservation was extended to fill an intensive two-day programme this year, with about 60 participants. Both the NKOS Workshop on Mapping Knowledge organization Systems, as well as Healthcare in Digital Libraries (HDL), ran their successful 1-day format, generating intensive discussion. Delegates to ECDL 2005 visit the many splendid rooms of the Austrian National Library Apart from the scientific programme, ECDL 2005 provided plenty of social activities, allowing participants to get together, enjoy themselves, and discuss matters in an inspiring setting. An ice-breaking event on Sunday evening provided a chance to sample a variety of magnificent Austrian wines. The Austrian National Library hosted the welcome reception in its magnificent State Hall which made such an impression that many delegates were left wondering whether the move to make libraries all-digital was the right direction to go! Finally, the conference dinner was held in the grand Festival Hall of the Town Hall of Vienna, opened according to Viennese tradition with a dancing performance by the dance sports centre UTSK Casino Wien. It also provided the perfect venue for the two awards presented at ECDL, namely the ECDL Best Paper Award, sponsored by the IEEE Technical Committee on Digital Libraries (TCDL), which was awarded to Wolf-Tilo Balke, Wolfgang Nejdl, Wolf Siberski, and Uwe Thaden for their paper entitled DL meets P2P - Distributed Document Retrieval based on Classification and Content. The DELOS young researcher award was presented to Christos Tryfonopoulos, the primary author of the paper LibraRing: An Architecture for Distributed Digital Libraries Based on DHTs, co-authored by Stratos Idreos and Manolis Koubarakis. Overall, ECDL 2005 proved to be a splendid opportunity for people to meet and discuss current core aspects of digital library research. Extensive photo documentation showing the highlights of ECDL 2005, are available on the ECDL website at http://www.ecdl2005.org We are looking forward to continuing these discussions at the 10th anniversary of ECDL, which will be held over 17-24 September 2006 in Alicante, Spain. Details on ECDL 2006 are available at http://www.ecdl2006.org |
Other Autumn Research Exchanges |
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The Newsletter has been in touch with two other researchers able to take advantage of the DELOS exchange programme in the autumn, Arne Jacobs and Nicola Ferro. Arne, of TZI, worked on the Context-of-Capture-task of the Audiovisual and Non-Traditional Objects cluster while visiting the Technical University of Crete. He and his host colleagues, principally Nektarios Moumoutzis and Georgios Ntampitzias worked in particular on the creation of the system architecture integrating partners' contributions. They also manually analyzed several hours of news video material, creating a news structure model for one news series format, and they also began developing automatic detectors for "visual structurizing tokens" characteristic for that format. In addition to the benefits that such collaboration brought to his research, Arne remarked that speaking English all the time while in Crete proved to be very good practice. "The people at TUC are all very kind", Arne commented to the Newsletter, saying that being able to see Greece a little more from the perspective of the Greeks had also been very interesting. Meanwhile Nicola had learnt of the Researcher Exchange Scheme from Prof. Maristella Agosti, his research co-ordinator for DELOS at the University of Padua and was thus able to collaborate with colleagues at University of Rome 1, principally Emanuele Panizzi and Rosa Trinchese. His researcher exchange was most concerned with DiLAS (Digital Library Annotation Service), a DELOS project with the aim of designing and developing an annotation service for digital libraries which will be tested and evaluated by users. A paper DiLAS: a Digital Library Annotation Service, co-authored with other partners, was presented in Paris in November. Nicola was also involved in the integration of the FAST system, an annotation service for DLs developed by University of Padua, with the MADCOW system, a Web annotation system developed by University of Rome, in order to provide part of the first prototype of the DiLAS system. Commenting on the advantages he saw in the exchange, Nicola felt it represented a distinct step forward for the DiLAS Project thanks to the face-to-face contact it provided and so allowing him and his colleagues to cover a pleasing amount of ground in the course of only two weeks. From a more personal standpoint, Nicola also felt the exchange provided the opportunity to see first-hand how other colleagues worked. He very much appreciated his Rome I colleagues' friendly and hospitable welcome. Further Information
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TEL and DELOS Confer on Common Interests |
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At the beginning of February this year representatives from The European Library (TEL) and the DELOS Network of Excellence met at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris to discuss areas of common interest with regard to the future development of The European Library. The approach to these discussions was overwhelmingly from a technological standpoint and a number of quite technical presentations and demonstrations were given over the course of 1 -2 February 2006. The first day focused on the demonstration of Digital Library functionality developed by DELOS partners. For example Pasquale Pagano of ISTI-CNR gave a presentation on the OpenDLib Digital Library covering a series of issues including system requirements, architecture, document handling and overall functionality. Klaus-Peter Klas of Duisburg University spoke on DAFFODIL and Strategic Support for User-Oriented Access to Heterogeneous Digital Libraries covering aspects such as searching with the DAFFODIL system, its personal library, active tools and the strategic support that it offers to less expert searchers in order to render their searching more effective and allow them to apply more complex search strategies in a user-friendly fashion. The aims of the SOMLib-based Interfaces to Digital Libraries were not dissimilar in their attempt to provide support for intuitive browsing of document collections and this item was followed by five more presentations entitled Eurovision: a text-based cross-language image retrieval system, Integration of services - Integration of Standards, Content based retrieval of images and 3D models, Annotation in Digital Libraries and Linking Paper and Digital. It was also particularly pleasing to see many representatives from MICHAEL in the audience for this first day. The second day of this collaborative event was designed to engender discussion of wider technological issues as well as providing an opportunity for delegates to consider specific topics for closer co-operation. It began with further presentations on evaluation plans for The European Library, search engines, DL architectures, DL services, annotation and personalization, multilinguality, metadata registries and finally user interfaces. Jill Cousins of The European Library Office facilitated the selection of topics for further discussion which led to a series of discussion groups on action plans for the future terminating in a plenary session where groups were able to report back on the outcomes of their discussion. Jill then rounded off the event by highlighting the next steps on from this review. Slides from these two days are available at: |
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