京都
 大 学 防 災 研 究 所 年 報 第 49 号 C 平 成 18 年 4 月
Annuals of Disas. Prev. Res. Inst., Kyoto Univ., No. 49 C, 2006

Building an Integrated Database System of Information on Disaster Hazard, Risk, andRecovery Process – Cross-Media Database (3)Hironori KAWAKATA*, Paul YOSHITOMI, Go URAKAWA**, Kelly CHAN,Hideki MATSUURA, Kenichi TATSUMI, Takeshi HARA***, Munenari AGUSA,Haruo HAYASHI, and Yoshiaki KAWATA* Department of Science and Engineering, Ritsumeikan University, Japan (presently)** Institute of Sustainability Science, Kyoto University, Japan (presently)***ESRI-Japan, Japan (presently)
Synopsis
Research in adopting digital library initiatives into the XMDB project has begun during
the year. This report specifically focuses on these activities: digital repository researches,social bookmarking, and dynamic classification. Some of the technologies that were examined
include JHOVE, which provides automated format validation and characterization; DSpace,which is a digital repository system that captures, stores, indexes, preserves, and redistributes
research data; Cannotea, which is a free online reference management service; and DynamicClassification, which is an approach to organize search results by the types of information
provided by the organizations themselves.
Keywords: database, digital repository, digital library initiative, disaster management

1.

2.

Introduction

During the 2005-2006 academic year, the XMDB
project has captured and indexed a sizable volume ofmaterials related to recent natural disasters: the Niigata
flood, the Chuetsu earthquake, and the Indian Ocean
tsunami. Data from hurricane Katrina in southern UnitedStates were also collected. We have used these test
datasets to confirm the design and feasibility of thesystem. As we solidified the code base of XMDB, wehave begun to adept other digital library initiatives intothe XMDB project during the year. This reportspecifically focuses on these activities: digital repository
researches, social bookmarking, and dynamic
classification. Other related activities, such as researcheson controlled vocabulary, automated terms extraction,and classifications, are reported elsewhere.

JHOVE

JHOVE is the JSTOR/Harvard Object Validation
Environment. It is a collaboration between JSTOR andthe Harvard University Library1) to develop an extensible
framework for format validation.
Functions provided by JHOVE can be summarized
as: format-specific identification, validation, andcharacterization of digital objects.
These are explained in more details on the project web
site, http://hul.harvard.edu/jhove/.
x Format identification is the process of determining
the format to which a digital object conforms; in otherwords, it answers the question: "I have a digital object;what format is it?"x Format validation is the process of determining thelevel of compliance of a digital object to the specification㧙㧙for its purported format, e.g.: "I have an object
purportedly of format F; is it?"x Format validation conformance is determined at
two levels: well-formedness and validity.
* A digital object is well-formed if it meets thepurely syntactic requirements for its format.
* An object is valid if it is well-formed and it meets
additional semantic-level requirements.
For example, a TIFF object is well-formed if it starts
with an 8 byte header followed by a sequence of Image
File Directories (IFDs), each composed of a 2 byte entry
count and a series of 8 byte tagged entries. The object isvalid if it meets certain additional semantic-level rules,
such as that an RGB file must have at least three sample
values per pixel.
x Format characterization is the process ofdetermining the format-specific significant properties ofan object of a given format, e.g.: "I have an object offormat F; what are its salient properties?"
The set of characteristics reported by JHOVE about adigital object is known as the object's representation
information, a concept introduced by the Open Archival
Information System (OAIS) reference model [ISO/IEC14721]. The standard representation information reported
by JHOVE includes: file pathname or URI, lastmodification date, byte size, format, format version,
MIME type, format profiles, and optionally, CRC32,
MD5, and SHA-1 checksums [CRC32, MD5, SHA-1].
Additional
media
type-specificrepresentation
information is consistent with the NISO Z39.87 Data
Dictionary for digital still images and the draft AES
metadata standard for digital audio.
Identification, validation, and characterization
actions are frequently necessary during routine operationof digital repositories and for digital preservation
activities. These actions are performed by modules. Theoutput from JHOVE is controlled by output handlers.
JHOVE uses an extensible plug-in architecture; it can beconfigured at the time of its invocation to include
whatever specific format modules and output handlersthat are desired. The initial release of JHOVE includes
modules for arbitrary byte streams, ASCII and UTF-8
encoded text, GIF, JPEG2000, and JPEG, and TIFF
images, AIFF and WAVE audio, PDF, HTML, andXML; and text and XML output handlers.
JHOVE currently supports the following digitalformats; these do not cover all of the resource types
available in XMDB.

JHOVE supported formats are:x AIFF: Audio Interchange File Format
x ASCII: ASCII-encoded textx BYTESTREAM: Arbitrary byte streams
x GIF: Graphics Exchange Format
x HTML: Hypertext Markup Language
x JPEG: Joint Photographic Experts Group rasterimages
x JPEG2000: JPEG2000
x PDF: Adobe Portable Document Format
x TIFF: Tagged Image File Format raster images
x UTF8: UTF-8 encoded text
x WAVE: Audio for Windows
x XML: Extensible Markup Language
XMDB was designed as a format-neutral database of
research resources; however, there are no validations inthe system. Additionally, format characterization is
manually performed and inputted. As the mission of
XMDB has been broadened from that of a catalogue or
portal, automated format validation and characterization
become increasingly important parts to support thatmission. Facilities provided by JHOVE enable asignificant increase in our data ingest capacity without alarge dedicated support staff.
3.

DSpaceDSpace is a digital repository system that captures,stores, indexes, preserves, and redistributes anorganization’s research data. The system was jointly
developed by MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard Labs.2)
Not unlike XMDB, DSpace accepts all forms of digitalmaterials including text, images, video, and audio files.
Possible content includes the following:
x Articles and preprints
x Technical reports
x Working papers
x Conference papers
x E-theses
x Datasets: statistical, geospatial, matlab, etc.
x Images: visual, scientific, etc.
x Audio files
x Video files
x Learning objects
x Reformatted digital library collections.
DSpace currently uses a qualified version of theDublin Core schema based on the Dublin Core Libraries
Working Group Application Profile (LAP). DSpace uses㧙㧙the LAP as a starting point for its application of Dublin
Core, borrowing most of the qualifiers from it andadapting others to fit. Some qualifiers were also added tosuit DSpace needs. The DSpace meta-data schema isavailable at http://dspace.org/technology/metadata.html.
There is an active project within DSpace to integrate
JHOVE into the repository.
While XMDB also implements the Dublin Coreschema in its meta-data, the database design in XMDB isconsiderably more elaborated than that of DSpace. The
team will evaluate the suitability of the DSpace schemain terms of harmonization with the existing XMDBdesign. One of the most reasons for this review is support
for the Open Archives Initiative’s Protocol for Metadata
Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Making collections within
XMDB available for harvesting significantly improves
the accessibility and usability of the holdings in DRS tolibraries and researchers in DPRI and even beyond theuniversity.
DSpace runs on the UNIX operating system;
presently it cannot be directly integrated into XMDB.
However, DSpace is available in open-source, thus manyof it functions, especially those of storage and indexing,can be integrated or selected ported to support XMDB atKyoto.
4.

Cannotea

Social bookmarking is saving bookmarks to a
publicly accessible web site and assigning tags to entries.
Users of these publicly accessible social bookmarking
web sites can search for resources by keyword (tags),persons (taggers), and classification schemes that otherusers have created and saved. Instead of looking into
general social bookmarking tools by del.icio.us c/oYahoo! Inc.3) – http://del.icio.us, we decided toinvestigate two more academically focused sites:
Connotea by Nature Publishing Group's NewTechnology team 4) and CiteULike by R. Cameron 5)(http://www.citeulike.org).
The notion of social bookmarking and of tagging
represents a shift away from formal taxonomies towards
folksonomies and common tags for resources. Lomas(2005)6) said “Tagging information resources withkeywords has the potential to change how we store andfind information. It may become less important to knowand remember where information was found and more
important to know how to retrieve it using a framework

created by and shared with peers and colleagues.”
Connotea is a free online reference management
service. It allows you to save links to all your favourite
articles, references, websites and other online resources
with one click. Connotea is also a social bookmarking
tool, so you can view other people's collections todiscover new, interesting content. Connotea is different
from general social bookmarking tool such as del.icio.us;
it is specifically designed for scientists. Some of thesefeatures are summarized on http://www.connotea.org/faq
x Firstly, Connotea recognizes many scientificjournals and websites, and when you save an item toyour library, it can automatically pull off thebibliographic information, such as author and journal.
Using a general bookmarking service, you would haveto save all this information as separate tags, which would
quickly get unwieldy. This automatic collection by
Connotea makes your record of the item much richer
than a simple URL. Additionally, development isongoing, and you will soon be able to search yourConnotea libraries by bibliographic information as well,enhancing Connotea as a reference management tool on
top of its use as simple social bookmarking service.
x Secondly, Connotea also provides the ability toimport and export references in RIS format, meaning
you can easily use Connotea to work with your existing
desktop reference management software.
x Thirdly, Connotea supports standards such as
DOIs and OpenURL that are used by academic
publishers.
x Fourthly, because Connotea is designed for thescientific community, you will benefit from a MoreSignal, Less Noise effect. The focus of the content
shared through Connotea is considerably tighter than ageneral bookmarking service, which helps to provide
better, more relevant recommendations via the social
nature of the service.
5.

Dynamic Classification

Dynamic classification is an approach to organize
search results such that the organization itself provides
information about the kinds of information that arerepresented by the documents in those results.
Dynamic categorization is based on three key
premises:
1. An appropriate categorization depends both on
the user's query and on the documents returned from the㧙㧙query.
2. The type of query can provide valuable
information about the expected types of categories andabout the criteria for assigning documents to thosecategories.
3. Taxonomic knowledge about terms in thedocument can enable useful and accurate categorization.
Pratt compared different methods in organizing
search results: term weights, controlled vocabulary,relevance ranking, and clustering. Her research indicatedan advantage in dynamic classification over relevanceranking, a common search results presentation method.
XMDB currently presents search results organized: (1)by resource types, (2) spatially, and (3) temporally.
XMDB will continue to enhance its search functions andthe presentation of search results.
6.

Remarks

In conclusion, we will be focusing on data ingest
aspects of XMDB during the 2006-2007 academic year;
we will proceed with both open-source and commercialsolutions. The commercial alternative, ChronoStar by
Kubota Comps Corporation7), is not reported here as thatevaluation did not commence until February of 2006. A
key goal of this coming year is to accumulate asignificant volume of research materials in XMDB tocritically test, review, and evaluate the usability of thedigital library for the research community within theinstitute and the university. The team has begun to
identify suitable “collections” for input into the database
beginning the fall of the year. One candidate dataset isthe existing SAIGAI database maintained at DRS8). The

simultaneous available of the familiar dataset in two
systems gives the team the chance of an objective
usability evaluation.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the Japanese
Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science andTechnology (MEXT) 21st Century COE Program forDPRI, Kyoto University (No.14219301, Program
Leader: Prof. Yoshiaki Kawata).
References
DRS, DPRI, Kyoto University: database SAIGAI,
http://maple.dpri.kyoto-u.ac.jp/saigai/
Cyprien Lomas (2005): 7 Things You Should Know
About Social Bookmarking, EDUCAUSE, http://www.
educause.edu/LibraryDetailPage/666?ID=ELI7001.
JSTOR and the Harvard University Library: JHOVE(JSTOR/Harvard Object Validation Environment),
http://hul.harvard.edu/jhove/.
Kubota Comps Corporation: ChronoStar, http://www.
chronostar.jp/index_e.htm.
MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard Labs.: Dspace,http://dspace.org/technology/metadata.html.
del.icio.us c/o Yahoo! Inc.: del.icio.us, http://del.icio.us/.
Nature Publishing Group's New Technology team:Connotea, http://www.connotea.org/.
Richard Cameron: CiteULike, http://www.citeulike.org/.

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