[Prev Page][Next Page][Contents]
Title : NSF 93-141 - Research on Digital Libraries
Type : Program Guideline
NSF Org: CISE / IRI
Date : September 16, 1993
File : nsf93141
RESEARCH ON DIGITAL LIBRARIES
A JOINT INITIATIVE OF:
NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION COMPUTER AND INFORMATION SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING DIRECTORATE
ADVANCED RESEARCH PROJECTS AGENCY COMPUTING SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY OFFICE and the SOFTWARE AND INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY OFFICE
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
PROPOSALS MUST BE RECEIVED AT NSF NO LATER THAN FEBRUARY 4, 1994
The past decade has seen a remarkable expansion in digital networks within the U.S. research and education community from a state where networking was the purview of the privileged few to one where it is considered an essential tool by millions of researcher and educators. Since the mid-1980's with the advent of NSFNET the volume of traffic, the number of interconnected networks and the functionality of the networks has grown and continues to grow exponentially. The entire assemblage of linked networks using the IP communications protocol throughout the world is now referred to as the Internet. It is a network of networks, which within the U.S., links one third of all two year and four year colleges and universities, many primary and secondary schools, public and private institutions, commercial enterprises, individuals in their homes, and foreign institutions in sixty countries. Information sources accessed via the Internet are the ingredients of a digital library.
Today, the network connects some information sources that are a mixture of publicly available (with or without charge) information and private information shared by collaborators. They include reference volumes, books, journals, newspapers, national phone directories, sound and voice recordings, images, video clips, scientific data (raw data streams from instruments and processed information), and private information services such as stock market reports and private newsletters. These information sources, when connected electronically through a network, represent important components of an emerging,universally accessable, digital library.
To explore the full benefits of such digital libraries, the problem for research and development is not merely how to connect everyone and everything together in the network. Rather, it is to achieve an economically feasible capability to digitize massive corpora of extant and new information from heterogeneous and distributed sources; then store, search, process and retrieve information from them in a user friendly way. Among other things, this will require both fundamental research and the development of intelligent software. It is the purpose of this announcement to support such research and development by combining the complementary strengths of the participating agencies in basic research, advanced development and applications, and academic/industry linkage.
Awards will
be made by NSF as Cooperative Agreements for proposals to engage in research and
testbed activities. Awards of up to $1,200,000 a year for up to four years
will be made to conduct programs of research and to develop and test elements of
a digital library on a significant scale in a distributed environment. It is
expected that up to 6 awards will be made under this announcement, depending on
the quality of proposals and the availability of funds.
Cost sharing
of at least 25% is required for all projects submitted in response to this
announcement. The proposed cost sharing will be considered in evaluating
proposals and will be a condition of any resulting awards (See the
Proposal Preparation section).
Successful
proposals will have demonstrated that as part of the research they will
digitize a significantly large and important information collection, or use
an existing collection, to serve as an experimental platform to demonstrate
scale-up potential and as an experimental testbed for the research proposed.
These testbeds must also be made accessible for research purposes to individuals
who are not part of the proposal team (see Proposal
Preparation, 3).
Each proposal
should, as appropriate to the research focus, include the active participation
of the following groups, as relevant (these may be separate organizations or
parts of a single organization):
client groups (e.g., specific research communities or other users of the information encompassed in the proposal);
A
requirement for all awardees is that all publications, reports, data and other
output from awards must be prepared in digital format and meet requirements for
storage, indexing, searching and retrieval in a repository to be set up to
capture results of these awards. These requirements will be devised jointly by
the group of all awardees and the sponsoring agencies.
It is the purpose of this initiative to provide the funding and leadership for research fundamental to the development of digital libraries. Applicants can propose research in any or all of the following areas: 1-capturing data (and descriptive information about such data) of all forms (text, images, sound, speech, etc.) and categorizing and organizing electronic information in a variety of formats. 2-advanced software and algorithms for browsing, searching, filtering, abstracting, summarizing and combining large volumes of data, imagery, and all kinds of information; and 3-the utilization of networked databases distributed around the nation and around the world.
The types of research related to the above three areas are shown below. The examples are not meant to be exclusive but are meant to be illustrative:
New research on systems for capturing data of all forms
For example:
- OCR page layout, segmentation and analysis software
- Speech recognition, audio segmentation and analysis software
- File conversion into editable, processable representations
- Broadcast capture & digitization (to generate multimedia data bases)
- Graphics understanding (image, drawing, graph recognition) Quality, fidelity maintenance
New research on how to categorize and organize electronic information in a variety of formats
For example:
- Indexing, interpretation, classification and cataloging
- Multi-lingual indexing on content and citations
- Hypermedia structuring and linking of documents
- Graphical interfaces for knowledge representation
- Browsing technology for large knowledge spaces, news grazing
New Research fundamental to the development of advanced software for searching, filtering, and summarizing large volumes of data, imagery, and all kinds of information
For example:
- Retrieval theories and models for data, metadata, information, knowledge bases, evaluation methods
- Formal structures of documents and texts, query languages
- Intelligent text processing and document management
- Feature-based image analysis and classification, pattern recognition
- Multi-pass retrieval algorithms (progressive refinement, feedback)
- Updatable indexing systems
- Spatial-temporal feature indexing of video
- Filtering, routing, alerting, selective dissemination of information
- Clustering, summarization, abstracting
- Natural language analysis for data extraction or representation
- Natural language generation systems
- Lexicon, thesaurus, concept space generation
- Adaptive/learning systems: connectionist, neural networks
- Context based pattern matching and retrieval of multimedia data
- Robust matching with noisy data, uncertainty, imprecision
- Fast search, query optimization
Research on visualization and other interactive technology for quickly browsing large volumes of imagery
For example:
- Pictorial feature recognition, image classification, Human perception (visual, auditory)
- Multi-scale displays, zooming - Data visualization (e.g., airflow, human genome)
- Interactive visualization control
- Use of simulation to improve visualization/description
- Navigation, hypermedia, retaining serendipity, guides/paths/tours
- Developing metaphors, usable virtual reality environment: suites of objects (peripherals, information types, relations, properties, views) that work together for each domain
- Sustaining rapid performance with regard to moving and manipulating large digital imagery data sets.
Research on networking protocols and standards needed to insure the ability of the digital network to accommodate the high volume, bandwidth and switching requirements of a digital library.
For example:
- Network security
- Protocol design
- Data compression
- Ensuring scalability for large orders of magnitude increases in the number of simultaneous users.
New research leading to simplifying the utilization of networked databases distributed around the nation and around the world
For example:
- Knowbots[trademark]/agents/mediators, intelligent gatekeepers
- Federated heterogeneous distributed object-oriented data and information base systems
- Personalized interactive news, magazine, and journal services
- Adaptable systems and services for disabled users, human augmentation
- Authentication, authorization
- Modeling, simulating usage, economics of access
- Collaboration technology with multimedia information interchange, multi- user editing, drawing, storage, retrieval, display, annotation, shared objects
Research on individual and group behavioral, social and economic issues in digital libraries
For example:
- Intellectual property rights
- Privacy and security
- Impact of digital libraries on the conduct of science
- Publishing in a digital environment
- Charging mechanisms for copyrighted documents
Proposal Evaluation and Schedule
[Prev Page][Next Page][Contents]