155 N 1340-7287

Digital Libraries, No.12

Proceedings ofInternational Joint Workshop
on
Digital Libraries 1998

7-9 September 1998
Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand

T 1 :J '>1 Jv~-=fg, No.12

ISSN 1340-7287

Digital Libraries, No.12

Proceedings ofInternational Joint Workshop
on
Digital Libraries 1998

7-9 September 1998
Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand

Organizors:• Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand• Faculty of Engineering, Kasetsart University, Thailand• The Thai Library Association Under the Royal Patronage of
H R H Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhom, Thailand

Sponsors:• Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand• Faculty of Engineering, Kasetsart University, Thailand• The Thai Library Association Under the Royal Patronage of
H R H Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhom, Thailand• University of Library and Info~ation Science, Japan• National Center for Science Information Systems, Japan

Digital Libraries, No .12, September 199 8
Thomas Baker
Asanee Kawtrakul
Vilas Wuwongse
Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok, Thailand
ISSN 1340-7287 ,http://www.DL.ulis.ac.jp/DLjournal/
http://beethoven.cpe.ku.ac.th/ijwdl98/DLjournal/

Message from Organizing Co-Chairs
The International Joint Workshop on Digital Libraries 1998 (IJWDL'98) iscomposed of School on Digital Libraries and the Twelfth Workshop on Digital
Libraries, a series of workshops that vntil nor have been held at the University of
Library and Information Science in Tsukuba, Japan. IJWDL'98 aims at providing
an international forum for researchers and developers together with librarians andpractitioners, particularly those in Thailand and this region, to share theirexperiences on trends in Digital Libraries (DLs ). It is the first international
meeting on DLs ever held in Thailand.
The Thai Library Association, Kasetsart University and the Asian Institute ofTechnology have cooperated as hosts· of this workshop. DLs use advanced
information technologies to organize information and make it accessible to users.
They will be an important element of any National Information Infrastructure.
This meeting will therefore be beneficial for Thailand and should raise the interestof Thai colleagues in DL research and development.
Our workshop would not have been a success without the kind assistance ofProfs. Koichi Tabata and Shigeo Sugimoto, the kind contribution of all tutorial
lecturers and the hard work of the Program Committee, co-chaired by Drs. Thomas
Baker and Asanee Kawtrakul. We also wish to express our deep appreciation to
the sponsors for their generous support.
The green surroundings on the campus of the Asian Institute of Technology
should combine with the program to make this meeting unforgettable.
Chutima SacchanandVilas Wuwongse
Organizing Co-Chairs

Message From the Program Committee
IJWDL'98 is the twelfth in a series of workshops that have been held since
1994 at the University of Libraiy and Information Science in Tsukuba Science
City. As the first to be held outside of Japan, this workshop was designed for asomewhat broader audience than its predecessors.We have sought to combine a
traditional scientific workshop, with its focus on new ideas and applications, witha more general School of Digital Libraries for interested professionals inSoutheast Asia who may be approaching the subject for the first time.
The four tutorials, accordingly, provide a "road map" to underlying
developments and trends. Starting literally with nuts and bolts, Nobuhito
Yamamoto introduces the basic technologies of computer and information
networks. The technologies of digital libraries, of course, continue to evolvefrom year to year, even month to month. Kikuta Masahiro and Youichi Shibata
focuses on how the multimedia document and information formats of theWorld-Wide Web, young as it is, are already being "reinvented" withsophisticated new functionality for advanced scholarship and digital commerce.
Indeed, library science itself is being largely reinvented to handle world-wide
repositories of information objects in an astounding variety of digital and physicalforms and of human and machine-readable languages. Thomas Baker andPraditta Siripan describe how a diverse community of scientists, librarians, andbureaucrats have achieved agreement on the Dublin Core -- a general methodfor describing these objects in ways that everyone can use and understand.
Putting such efforts into a broader historical context, Shigeo Sugimoto and Jun
Adachi explain how librarians and information providers have built on andcombined these technologies to develop projects in the emerging field of digital
libraries.
The papers in the scientific workshop report on more specific topics anddevelopments. Edie Rasmussen draws lessons from her experience in building a
digital library to support elementary school teachers. Fytton Rowland considers
the past few years of experimentation and offers some realistic reflections on how
radically the ne\v technologies may change -- or not change -- the nature ofresearch libraries. Yoshikatsu Nagata describes the technology used to retrieve
am~e~ ma muh:unedrn digital library.
F0H0wmg up on the turorials about meradata and information structure,.se\·eral ~pets .;J.dres.j. tedL:1.r.:..at and 5U-ategK aspects of the movement towards
nie,... mtematicn,al :;:tar...dards zr, thc·5e areas Em: \1iller and Stuart Weibel provide
an update on the rapi~ c!"\Oi\?Rg Duti.hn Core data model, while Thomas Baker
relates this model to the K-U\ltJ~ ·tf the W0rking Group for Dublin Core in
Multiple Languages. Han Sui Cbo: di::s...:ribes how Dublin Core can be used inunion catalogs of scholarly matenals Sh1ge0 Sugimoto reports on a method fortyping and searching text in languages h:k-: Japanese using Java applets on "offthe-shelf' Web browsers. Vilas \\iuwongse .:onrributes a critical assessment of
the Resource Description Framework as a ,vh .1le.
.

One major area of digital library research seeks to provide computers withthe ability to recognize and display different writing systems and the intelligenceto translate texts and search requests between languages. Akiko Aizawa describes
new methods for generating subject keywords in multiple languages
automatically. Asanee Kawtrakul discusses the specific linguistic problems
encountered in searching through digital texts in the Thai language.
The papers in these proceedings reflect work in progress on a number offronts. Presentations that reported on late-breaking news are represented here by
their abstracts.

Thomas Baker
Asanee Kawtrakul
Program Co-Chairs

IJWDL98 Organization
Organizing Committee
Co-Chairs:
Vilas Wuwongse.(AIT, Thailand)
Chutima Sacchanand (TLA, Thailand)

Program Committee
Co-Chairs:
Thomas Baker (AIT, Thailand)
Asanee Kawtrakul (KU, Thailand)Committees:
Sugimoto Shigeo (ULIS, Japan)
Koichi Tabata(ULIS, Japan)
Surapan Meknavin (NECTEC, Thailand)
Tassana Hanpol(TLA, Thailand)
Somsuang Prutikul(TLA, Thailand)

AIT: Asian Institute of Technology (http://www.ait.ac.th)
TLA: The Thai Library Association Under the Royal Patronage of
H RH Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn
KU: Kasetsart University (http://www.ku.ac.th)
ULIS: University of Library and Information Science (http://www.ulis.ac.jp)
NECTEC: National Electronics and Computer Technology Center(http://www.nectec.or.th)Table of Contents
Tutorials
Computer Technology and Networks for Digital Libraries ................................ . 1
Nobuhito Yamamoto (University ofTsukuba, Japan)

SGML/XML Re-Inventing the WEB ......................................................... 6
Masahiro Kikuta (Synergy Incubate Inc., Japan)
Specification of XML ............................................................................ .. 23
Youichi Shibata (Synergy Incubate Inc., Japan)
Overview and Management of Digital Libraries II ........................................ 40
A Case ofNACSIS-EIS and Its On-line Journals
Jun Adachi (National Center for Science Information Systems, Japan)

Workshop
A Digital Library for K-12 Educators: the PEN-DOR project .......................... . 46
Myron Bright, Karen Fullerton, Jane Greenberg, Maureen McClure,
Edie Rasmussen and Darin Stewart (University of Pittsburgh, USA)

Recent developments in scholarly publishing and their impact on libraries ......... .47
Fytton Rowland (Loughborough University, UK)

Retrieval System for the Microfilm Image Databases in the Media Center, .......... 64
Osaka City University
NAGATA Yoshikatsu, SHIBAYAMA Mamoru, KITA Katsuichi,
MAEDA Harumi (Osaka City University, Japan)

The Dublin Core Data Model. ................................................................ ... 71
Eric Miller and Stuart Weibel (OCLC Office of Research, USA)

Cataloging for the Web: Dublin Core and the Resource Description Framework ... 72
Thomas Baker (Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand)

Introduction to DC-based Union Cataloging Systems for Academic ................... 73
Journals in Digital Library Environments
Han Suk Choi (Korea Research Information Center, Korea)

Extension of MHTML to Text Input and Text Search Functions in Multiple ....... 74
Languages on Off-the-shelf Browsers
Shigeo Sugimoto 1, Shigetaka Nakao 1, Myriam Dartois 1, Jun Ohta 1,
Akira Maeda2 , Tetsuo Sakaguchi 1, Koichi Tabata 1(University of Library and Information Science1,
Nara Institute of Science and Technology2, Japan)

Reasoning about RDF Elements ............................................................... 82
Vilas Wuwongse1 , Chutiporn Anutariya 1 and Ekawit Nantajeewarawat2(Asian Institute ofTechnology 1, Thammasat University2 , Thailand)

A Graph-based Method for Automatic Generation of Multilingual Keyword ...... 94
Clusters and Its Applications
Akiko Aizawa, Noriko Kando and Kyo Kageura(National Center for Science Information Systems, Japan)

An Intelligent Search for Thai Text in Digital Libraries ................................ 104
Asanee Kawtrakul,Thanussak Thanyasiri, Chavalit Chiraratachan,Nathavit Buranapraphanont, Preeti Piti-alongkorn,
Navapt Khantonthong , Soontharee Koompairojn(Kasetsart University, Thailand)

Author Index................................................................................ 105

Keyword Index............... ,, .......... '' ........ , ..... , ................................. 106

TUTORIALSIJWDL'98
International Joint Workshop on Digital Libraries 1998
7-9 September 1998
Asian Institute of Technology
Bangkok,Thailand

Computer Technology and Networks for Digital Libraries
Nobuhito Yamamoto
Institute of Information Science and electronics
University of Tsukuba
Tennoudai 1-1-1, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8573, Japan
1. Architecture of Computers

A computer system generally consists of four major functional blocks, processing unit,
storage unit, input/output channel and peripheral devices. These blocks are connectedwith each other by a bus.
(1) Processing Unit (PU)
Numerical calculation operations such as addition, multiplication and comparisons are
the basic operation inside a processing unit. Control of a program execution path likebranching is also the important operation in it. After the invention of microprocessor
technology, PU has been able to be manufactured in relatively lower cost. This caused
the personal computer very popular nowadays.
(2) Storage Unit (SU)The main storage or main memory is the information storage which PU can handle
directory in fast speed. The memory is accessed randomly by its memory address.
DRAM technology gives us the big mass capacity recently, e.g. 128Mbytes or
256Mbytes.
(3) Input/Output Channel
It is the interface between a main function box of computer and its peripheral devices.
Information is read-in and written-out through 1/0 channel.
(4) Peripheral Devices
A computer works with numbers of peripheral devices, keyboard, display, pointing
device such as a mouse and secondary storage units. Hard disks are the main devices oftoday's secondary storage unit. Floppy diskette drive, tape drive, magneto optical disk(MO) drive and compact disk (CD) drive are used for the secondary storage unit.
Keyboard and display are the basic devices when a user uses a computer. Network
connection device is increasing its role.
2. Hardware and Software

Not only hardware devices or boxes are a computer system. Software is the importantpartner components for hardware. Software is a series of processing instructions for1

computers. We can not do any computation or processing without any software.
3. Operating System (OS)An operating system is a special program or software which maintain the function of acomputer and manages every computational processes including 1/0. User's program orapplication works with the assistance of operating system. MacOS and Windows are
the popular OS's for personal computers. UNIX is a very common OS on workstations.
Conventional main frame computers have their own OS's. OS/MVS for IBM machines
and GCOS for GE machines are well known.

4. Recent Trends of Computation
User-friendliness and high performance computing are the keywords for recent
computation scene. A computer was before a physically big machinery which was
installed at particular institutions like computer centers. That means. users had to sharethe centralized computing resources. After the small scale computers advent, we havebeen able to have computing resources personally at our own places. And computers
became a useful tool not only for tl\e professional but for common people named endusers. User-friendliness is so one of the "must" condition for non professional endusers to use a computer. Graphical Users Interface (GUI) technology has brought easy
understanding of situation a user is facing in front of a computer, say What you see iswhat you get (WYSIWYG).
High performance computing is the resent demand too. Traditional super computerhas been using the vector processing technology which computes a series of the samekind of calculation operation in very high speed. Parallelism is another paradigm forincreasing speed. And we can compute the same type of calculation concurrently using
a number of processing units. Computers which have even thousands of PU have been
manufactured now.

5. Networking
Networking of computers began at the end of 1950s in the United States. A handling
unit of information called "packet" was introduced there, and packet transfer became thebasic scheme of communication on the computer network. The first network was a
1mere set of connections among host computers installed at distant places. In 70s theconcept of Local Area Network (LAN) was introduced at Xerox PARC. The UNIXdevelopment team at UC Berkeley chose ARPA network protocol known as TCP/IP for
handling their LAN. The concept of networking was expanded to connections among2networks. This network has evolved to the Internet of today.
6. OSI Reference Model

The OSI reference model has been used frequently for explaining network structures.
The model consists of seven logical layers. Though actual implementation of
networking software may differ from the OSI model.
Communication between two hosts is performed with operations of going up and down
the layers.

7. Transmission Media
Conventional serial lines and Ethernet (l0Mbps) are the popular media for networking
at the first generation. As the strdng demand for high speed transmission, the Fast
Ethernet and FDDI have been becoming the succeeding main media for LAN, whosetransmission speed is 1DOMbps. Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) technology isalso used for the latest network. Digital Subscriber Line (xDSL) technology is also the
hot topic in this field.
8. IP address and MAC address

Every host on the TCP/IP network has its own individual IP address. Based on thisaddress, a target host is identified whether it is on the same local network or is locatedon another network. Two hosts on the same network communicate using Media AccessControl (MAC) addresses, which is associated to the IP address. This association is
performed using one protocol in the TCP /IP suit.
9. Routing

At the gate of a network, information packets are handled whether they may pass thegate, and determined which interface should be chosen to the destination network. It iscalled "routing". Special hardware which performs routing is named a router. So arouter connects adjacent (sub)networks and transfers packets from one network toanother. Information for routing packets is exchanged and shared with each routers
using routing protocols.

RIP, OSPF and BGP are dominant and frequently used

protocols.
10. Security

Securities are very important for both computers and networks. Personal computers
are basically used as PERSONAL tool. That means one owner only use it and no other3person touches it. But for the common information resources such as database servers
and computation servers, being secure is one of the most important requirements. The
same thing can be said about the network. If a router is intruded, traffic of the network
will be affected seriously and communication between hosts on that network will be
hard to be established.
11. Applications

A computer can be applied solo in many jobs. Numerical computation or analysis was
the most fundamental usage of computers. But recently the application field has been
expanding and the usability become the main concern of users. Word processing andspread sheet processing are the most popular applications. After networking computers,
usability has been increased incredibly. Below is some examples of typical network
computing application.
11.1. Remote Resource Access
A computer connected to a network can be accessed from practically any places.
Users can compute their own job using a host at a distance, or can share information
stored on one computer. Information retrieval or database manipulation is the typicalapplication of this kind at the libraries.
Handling old valuable documents in forms of digital photo images may be aconvenient method which microfiches had been used for. Moreover, when all
information on papers are converted to the electrical form, people will seemingly no.

more necessary to go to the place where that document is stored actually. Instead,he/she will use a network connection and access the information at their local places.
11.2. Multimedia Communication
As the development of network technology, we are now able to use
computers/networks as useful media, in particular so called multimedia which transfer
audio visual information.
World Wide Web (WWW) is one of the most successful and fruitful application. It.

handles hyper text documents very easily and give the facility of publication. WWW
provide a good human interface for understanding the situation in front of him/her (Pushtechnology).
Video Conferencing is also the most advanced and expectative application of network
computing. We can communicate with the participants employing video images andvoices.

4

Broadcasting on the network is cl hot topic of multimedia application. Multicast
transmission is a new technology which many network researchers and engineers aredeveloping. It provides an band width efficient way of transmission and therefore suits
for the broadcasting purpose.
12. Conclusion

It is not necessary to say that the traditional library work is very important. ,For, thatwork handles the primary data directory. On that fundamental work, new technology
will be expected to give us new aspects. Database, retrieval engine, GUI andnetworking, these will surely become much and more important keywords of thetomorrow's library activities.
References(1) Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), Cisco technology directions, Cisco Systems,
1993.
(2) Eriksson, H., Mbone: The Multicast Backbone, CACM, Vol.37, No.8, pp61-66,
1994.
(3) Lynch, D.C., Rose, M.T., Internet system handbook, Addison-Wesley, 1993.
(4) Page, N., White Paper, Streaming Web Video, Multimedia Access Corporation,
1997.
(5) Thaler, D., et. al., Interoperability Rules for Multicast Routing Protocols, InternetDraft, IETF, 1996.
(6) VIA 188 - Distance Learning and Video Conferencing, AG Communication
Systems, 1997.
(7) Yamamoto, N., Multicast Com~unication on a Campus Environment, Proceedingsof the 3rd International Workshop on Academic Information Networks and Systems,
1997.
(8) Yamamoto, N., Communication among Sparse Groups using Streaming Video
Technology, Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Academic Information
Networks and Systems, 1998.

5'.......

SGML/XMLRe-Inventing the WEB
8 Sept. 1998

Masahiro Kikuta
Syn.ergy Incubate Inc.

'.......

What is happening on the NET?
✓ The extraordinary growth of theWorld-Wide Web<Key Technology>• HTTP. Hypertext Transfer Protocol• URL:Uniform Resource Locator• HTML:Hypertext Markup Language

6

/Jt

'
.......

/Jt

HTTP✓ HTTP.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol• The client-server TCP/IP protocol used on
the World-Wide Web for the exchange ofHTML documents.

'.......

URL✓ URL:Uniform Resource Locator• A draft standard for specifying an object
on the Internet, such as a file or a
newsgroup. URLs are used extensively on
the World-Wide Web. They are used inHTML documents to specify the target of a
hyperlink.

7

/Jt

II.
HTML
✓ HTML:Hypertext Markup Language• A Hypertext document format used on theWorld-Wide Web. Built on top of SGML.
"Tags" are embedded in the text. A tag
consists of a "<", a "directive" (caseinsensitive), zero or more parameters anda ">". Matched pairs of directives, like "<TITLE>" and "</TITLE>" are used todelimit text which is to appear in a special
place or style.

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.......

The World-Wide Web:

Multidimensional Multimedia

1Web7
WfMWW O IBrowser
Web I~ fl\f----VU:
Live
Applicationeee •IllHTML Files.
Graphics

Mobile Code (Java)

Multimedia
Repository

Video
VR

SGML

Plug-ins
OS calls (ActiveX)
Local repositories

Sound

'
.......

What's wrong with HTML?
✓ HTML was optimized for easy

learning• One tag set for all applications• Predefined semantics for each tag• Predefined data str'uctures• No formal validation✓ HTML trades power for ease of use

/Jt
What's wrong with HTML?
✓ HTML is well suited to simple

applications,✓ But poorly suited to more demanding

applications• Large or complex collections of data
• Data that must be used in many ways
• Data with a long life cycle'. ....
''

SGML offers,✓ Extensibility• Authors can define new tag names andattribute names for documents by
specifying their their syntax and semantics.
✓ Structure• Documents can be containers for otherdocuments, with arbitrary nesting.
• This allows complex documents to beconstructed from simpler documents.

11

/Jt

.......
'II.

SGML offers,✓ Validation• If desired, any SGML document canreference a description of its grammar so
applications can validate that the document
conforms to its specified structure.
IEEE Internet Computing
By Rohit Khare/ Adam Rifkin'.......

SGML can be✓ Safest of all formats for high-value

data (ISO standard 8879)✓ Best available format forsearch/retrieval.
✓ Easily converted to HTML.
But ..... .

12'.......

What' wrong with SGML
✓ Designed before the PC revolution.
✓ Large, cumbersome specification(S00pages)✓ Difficult for people to read andunderstand✓ Difficult for computers to process
and manipulate✓ High entry cost'.......

Motivation to XML✓ SGML has been here since 1986, and✓ Many of us think it's a good idea, but✓ It hasn't caught on that fast, and✓ The Web is here, and✓ We need it even more than ever!

13

II.

.

. . . .. . .

/JtWhat is XML?
✓ Next step in Web evolution✓ Goes beyond the limitations of HTML✓ Will create new Web applications• database exchange• Distribution of processing to clients• Client-side manipulation of views into thedata• Customization of information by intelligent
agents• Management of document collections/Jt
Why XML?
✓ For a new generation of Web applications:• Extensibility: Users can define new tags asneeded• Structure: Hierarchical data can be modeled to
any level of complexity• Validation: Data can be checked for structural
correctness• Media independence: The same content can be
published in multiple media

14'.......

XML Design Goals
1.XML shall be straightforwardly
usable over the Internet
2.XML shall support a wide variety of
applications
3.XML shall be compatible with SGML
• Existing SGML tools read & write XML• XML documents are SGML documents• The same parse can be generated• Similar expressive power'.......

XML Design Goals
4.lt shall be easy to write programs
which process XML documents.
5. The number of optional features in
XML is to be kept to the absolute
minimum, ideally zero
6.XML documents should be humanlegible and reasonably clear

15

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'
.......

/Jt

XML Design Goals
7. The XML design should be prepared
quickly
8. The design of XML shall be formal andconcise
9.XML documents shall be easy to create
10. Terseness is of minimal importance/Jt
Document is composed of
These slides are designed
for XML tutorial seminar
in IJWDL'98, ..... .

CONTENTSTRUCTURE
SGMUXML
byKIKUTA

PrefaceThis article ...
... XMLPRESENTATION

16'.......

II.

XML allow us:
These slides are designed
for XML tutorial seminar
in IJWDL'98, ......

CONTENTSOUTPUT
Specification

SGML/XML
byKIKUTA

ORMATTE

PrefaceThis article ...

• F - - - + • ... XML

PRESENTATIONSTRUCTURE

XML specifies the content and structure of document
in a way that allows particular presentation.

II.
Relationship to SGML
✓ XML is a simplified subset of SGML:• Powerful• No limits on namespace of structural depth• Easy to implement• Small enough for Web browsers✓ The translation from SGML to XML isstraightforward

17

/Jt
What is the role of XML?
✓ SGML• For large publication systems• High-value information✓ XML• For structured delivery over the web• In many cases will be adequate for authoring✓ HTML• For delivery over the web• Low-value information'.......

Advantages of XML✓ Conformant with existing

international standard (SGML)✓ Complete extensibility -- no taglimitations✓ Full internationalization✓ Validation and editorial control✓ Ability to model any kind of

hierarchical data

18

/Jt

'
.. ' ....

/Jt

Advantages of XML✓ Automatic generation of links andnavigational aids
✓ Increased speed of access toessential data
✓ Print and online versions from same

source✓ Dynamically user-configurable views✓ Next-generation hypertext

capabilities/Jt
The XML family✓ XML (eXtensible Markup Language)• A subset of SGML(ISO 8879) designed foreasy implementation✓ XLL(eXtensible Linking Language):• A set of standard hypertext mechanisms
based on HyTime(ISO/IEC 10744)and the
Text Encoding lnitiative(TEI)19'. ' .....

II.

The XML family✓ XSL(eXtensible Stylesheet Language)• A standard stylesheet language for structured
information formed by subsetting DSSSL(ISO/IEC 10179),designing an alternativesyntax, and incorporating key CSS concepts

II.
Industry specific tag language✓ CML:Chemical Markup Language✓ CDF:Channel Definition Format✓ OFX:Open Financial Exchange✓ HDML:Handheld Device Markup

Language✓ MathML:Mathematics Markup
Language✓ PGML:Precision Graphics Markup

Language20'........

II.

The XML applications can✓ use Web clients to mediate between

multiple heterogeneous databases✓ distribute the load from Web servers
to their clients✓ use Web clients to present different

views of the same data
✓ employ agents to tailor information

discovery and filtering to thecustomized needs. . . . . ' .. .

User view of the data
✓ Different views of whole documents• Novice view vs. expert view
• Outline vs. content• Generated Tables of Contents✓ Different views of documentcomponents• Bar graph vs. pie chart• Totals by region vs. totals by business
units

21

II.

XML require additional
mechanisms/Jt✓ Programs, applets, or scripts

designed for a specific tag set✓ Industry agreements on theprocessing of specific tags
✓ Tag-sensitive components.
✓ Stylesheets/Jt
The future of the Web✓ View Selection: Letting The User Decide✓ Web Agents: Data That knows About Me✓ Users no longer tied to a proprietary

format✓ An end to domination of the market by a
few big companies✓ An end to domination of the market by a
few big countries
Jon Bosak Chairman of XML WG, W3C

22

XML

>Specification <of XML- Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 -Y ouichi Shibata>

synergy Incubate Inc.

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XML documents(. Legal XML documents are said to bewell-formed having a each logical tree witha single root
. The XML documents with an optional set of
constraints (a DTD),they are said to be
valid

Synergy Incubate Inc.

23

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>

Well-formed<
Tag/Attribute Syntax. Element types and attribute names arecase-sensitive. EmP,ty elements must be marked byclosing/>. Attribute values must be quoted (' or ")Synergy Incubate Inc.

>

Element of XML
Documents

J.1l<. XML Documents are composed of;
1. prolog
2. element
3. Misc[1] document : := prolog element Misc*
[27)

Misc

::=

Comment I PI I

S

Synergy Incubate Inc.
24

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>

XML Declaration(

1. Specify of Version Number
2. Encording Declaration
3. Standalone Document Declaration
example:<?xml version="l.O" encoding="UTF-8"
standalone="no" ?>[23] XMLDecl ::= '<?xml' Versioninfo EncodingDecl?
SDDecl? S? '?>'

Synergy Incubate Inc.

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> Encording Declaration <1. UTF-8
2. UTF-16
3. ISO-10646-UCS-2
4. ISO-10646-UCS-4
5. ISO-8859-1
6. ISO-8859-2
7.
8 ..

9. IS0-8859-9

10.Shift-JIS
11.EUC-JP
12. ISO-2022-JP[80) EncodingDecl : := S 'encoding' Eq ('"' EncName '"'I 11 ' 11 EncName 11 ' 11 )Synergy Incubate Inc.

25

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> Standalone Document <Declaration• The value "yes" indicates that there arenomarkup declarations external to the
document entity• The value "no" indicates that there are or
may be such external markup declarations* Load reduction for XML processors[32] SDDecl : := S 'standalone' Eq ( ('"" ('yes' I 'no')" ' ") I ( ' " ' ( ' yes ' I 'no ' ) ' " ' ) )Synergy Incubate Inc.

>

11(

Document Type
Declaration(. The XML document type declaration
contains or points to markup declarations[28] doctypedecl ::= '<!DOCTYPE' S Name(S ExternalID)? S? (' [' (markupdecllPEReferencelS)*'] I
S?)? '>'[75] ExternalID ::= 'SYSTEM' S SystemLiteral
I 'PUBLIC' S PubidLiteral S SystemLiteral

SystemLiteral ::= ('"' ["")* '"')
I ("'" ["']* "'"l[11][12] PubidLiteral ::= '"' PubidChar* '"'I "'" (PubidChar - "'")* "'"[13] PubidChar ::= #x20 I #xD I #xA I [a-zA-Z0-9J
I [-' ()+, ./:=?; !*#@$_%]

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> Markup Declaration <. Markup declaration provide a grammar of
documents. DTD(document type definition) is agrammar of documents
Markup declaration declares;
1. erement type declaration
2. attribute-list declaration
3. entity declaration
4. notation declaration
5. Processing Instruction
6. Comments(29]
markupdecl : := elementdecl I AttlistDecl
I EntityDecl I NotationDecl I PI I Comment

Synergy Incubate Inc. ./.J{_>

Element(. Tow types Elements
1. EmptY:-Element Tag_§
2. Start-Tags,content,cnd-Tags[39]

element ::= EmptyElemTag I STag content ETag

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./.JL

> Empty-Element Tags <. Empty-eler11~nt tags may be used for any
element which has no content, whether or
not it is declared using the keyword
EMPTY. For interoperability, theempty-element tag must be used, and can
onlY. oe used'--for elements which are
declared EMl""'TY
example:<IMG·src="http://www.w3.org/Icons/WWW/w3c_home" />[44]

EmptyElemTag ::= '<' Name {S Attribute)* S? '/>'

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/JL

> Start-Ta2s~Content, <Enct-1.ags. The beginning of every non-empty XML ·element is marked by a start-tag .
. The Name in the start- and end-tags gives
the element's type. The Name-Att\7alue
pairs are referred to as the attribute~pecifications of the element, with theName in each pair referred to as theattribute name and the content of the
AttValue (the text between the ' or "delimiters) as the attribute value
example:<aff>Synergy Inclubate Inc.</aff>(40]

STag ::= '<' Name (S Attribute)* S? '>'[43]
content ::= (element I CharData I Reference
I CDSect I PI I Comment)*(42]

ETag : := 'Synergy Incubate Inc.

28

/Jt

Character data(

. All text that is not markup constitutes thecharacter data of the document. The ampersand character(&) and the left
angle bracket (<) may appear in their literalform only when used as markuP. delimiters,
or within a comment, a processing
instruction, or a CDATA section. The right angle bracket (>) may be
represented using the string "&gt;'d' andmust for compatibility, be escape using"&gt;'' or a character reference when it
appears in the string "]]>" in content, whenthat string is not marking the end of a
CDATA section[14)

CharData ::= ["<&)* -(["<&]*']]>'["<&]*)

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Reference
1. Entity Reference. An XML document may consist of one
or many storage units. These are called
entities. An entity reference refers to the content
of a named entity. References toparsed general entities use ampersand{&) and semicolon (;) as delimiters
2. Character Reference. A character reference refers to a
specific character in the 1S0/IEC 10646
character set, for example one notdirectly accessible from available input
devices(67]

Reference::= EntityRef I CharRef[68)

EntityRef ::='&'Name ';'[66]

CharRef : := ' ' [0-·9)+ ';'l'&#x' [0-9a-fA-F)+ ' ; '..

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>

·CDATA Sections. COATA sections may occur anywherecharacter data may occur- they are used toescape blocks of text containing characterswhich would otherwise be recognized as
marku~. CDATA sections begin with thestring <![CDATA[" and end with the string"]]>"

example:<! [CDATA[<greeting>Hello, world!</greeting>J]>(18]

CDSect : := CDStart CData CDEnd[19]

CDStart : := '<! [CDATA['(20]

CData ::= (Char* - (Char* '])>' Char*))[ 21]

CDEnd : : = ' ] ] >'Synergy Incubate Inc.

>

LJl

(Pl)Processing
Instructions. PrbGessing instructi9n~ (Pis) ~llow
documents to contain mstructrons forapplications
example:<?metaviewer color green?>[16} PI ::= '<?' PITarget(S (Char* - (Char* '?>' Char*)))? '?>'
[ 17 J'PI Target : : = Name - ( ( 'X' I ':x') ( 'M' I 'm' ) ( 'L' I 'l' ) )Synergy Incubate Inc.

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.,1(

>

Comments(. Comments may appear anywhere in a
docµr,ent outside other markup; in
add1t1on, they may appear within the
document type declaration at places
allowed by the grammar. They are not partof the documenl's character data
example:<!-- declarations for(15)

Comment : := '<!--'& -->( (Char -I ('-' (Char - '-')))* •-->''-')

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ill

Document TYn...eDefinition(D.,1-u). XML documents may1 and should, begin
with an XML declaration which specifies
the version of XML being used
. The document type decraration canf oint toan external subset {a special kind oexternal entity) containing markup
declarations. A markup declaration is an element typedeclaration, an attribute-list declaration, an
entity declaration, or a notation declaration(28)
doctypedecl ::= '<!DOCTYPE' S Name(S ExternalID)? S? (' [' (markupdecl
I PEReference I S)* ']' S?)? '>'(29) markupdecl : := elementdecl I AttlistDecl
I EntityDecl I NotationDecl I PI I Comment[69]

PEReference ::= '%' Name ' · 'Sy~ergy Incubate Inc.

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./.Jt

>

Element Type
Declarations(. The element structure of an XML
document may, for validation purposes, beconstrained using element type andattribute-list declarations. An element typedeclaration constrains the element's
content. Element type declarations often constrain
which element types can appear as
children of the element
Synergy Incubate Inc.

>

Element Content<. An element type has element content whenelements of that type must contain only
child elements (no character data). An element is valid if there is a declaration
matching elementdecl where the Name
matches the element type, and one of thefollowing holds
1. The declaration matches EMPTY andthe element has no content
2. The declaration matches children andthe sequence of child elements belongs
to the language generated by theregular expression in the content
model, with optional white space(characters matching the nonterminalS) between-each parr of child elements
3. The declaration matches Mixed andthe content consists of character dataand child elements whose types match
names in the content model.
4. The declaration matches ANYhand
the types of any child elements ave
been declared(45] elementdecl ::='<!ELEMENT'S Names contentspec S? '>'f46) contentspec ::= 'EMPTY' I 'ANY' IMixedlchildren·

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f1l

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>

Attribute-List
Declarations<. Attribute-list declarations may be used
. To define the set of attributes pertaining
to a given element type. To establish type constraints for these
attributes. To provide default values for attributes[52) AttlistDecl ::= '<!ATTLIST' S Name
AttDef* S? '>'[53} AttDef ::= S Name S AttType S DefaultDecl

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>

Attribute Types

LJl<. XML attribute types are of three kinds: astring type, a set of tokenized types, andenumerated types[54} AttType ::= StringType I TokenizedType
I EnumeratedType[55)

StringType ::= 'CDATA'[56} TokenizedType ::= 'ID' I 'IDREF'I 'IDREFS' I 'ENTITY'
I I ENTITIES I I I NMTOKEN I I I NMTOKENS I[57}

EnumeratedType : := NotationType I Enumeration[58] NotationType ::= 'NOTATION' S'(' S? Name (S? 'I' S? Name)* S? ')'(59] Enumeration ::= '(' S? Nmtoken(S? 'I' S? Nmtoken)* S? ')'Synergy Incubate Inc.

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Attribute Defaults. An attribute declaration provides
information on whether the attribute's
presence is required, and if not, how an
XML processor should react if a declared
attribute is absent in a document[60) DefaultDecl ::= '#REQUIRED' I '#IMPLIED'
I (('#FIXED' S)? AttValue)

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> Physical Structures

J.1l

<

. An XML document may consist of one or
many storage units. Ttiese are called
entities; they all have content and are allidentified by name. Each XML document
has one entity called the document entity
1. General/Parameter Entities
2. Internal/External Entities
3. Parsed/Unparsed Entities

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J.1l

> Entity Declarations[ 7 0]

EntityDecl : := GEDecl I PEDecl/* GEDecl:General Entities*//* PEDecl:Parameter Entities*/[71]
GEDecl ::= '<!ENTITY' S Name S
EntityDef S? '>'[72]
PEDecl ::= '<!ENTITY' S '%' S
Names PEDef S? '>'[73)
EntityDef ::= EntityValue
I (BxternalID NDataDecl?)[74)

PEDef ::= EntityValue I ExternalID

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./.Jt

Internal/External
Entities
Example of an internal entity declaration<!ENTITY Pub-Status "This is the specification.">If the entity is not internal, it is an external entity[75]
ExternalID ::= 'SYSTEM' S SystemLiteral
I 'PUBLIC' S PubidLiteral S SystemLiteral[76)

NDataDecl: := S 'NDATA' S Name

Examples of external entity declarations:<!ENTITY open-hatch
SYSTEM"http://www.synergy.co.jp/boilerplate/OpenHatch.xml"><!ENTITY open-hatch
PUBLIC"-//synergy//TEXT Standard open-hatch boilerplate//EN""http://www.synergy.eo.jp/boilerplate/OpenHatch.xml"><!ENTITY hatch-pie
SYSTEM" .. /grafix/OpenHatch.gif"
NDATA gif >Synergy Incubate Inc.

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LJ(

>

Parsed/Unparsed
Entities. Parsed Entities
Text Data, parsed as the ingredients of
XML Documents. Unparsed Entities
Entities that may not be parsed (Graphic
and/or Text Data)

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.,1(

> Entities may be used <without declaration. &It; : <. &gt; : >. &amp;: &. &apos; : '. &quot; : "Synergy Incubate Inc.

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J.1t

>

Entity Referenee<. An entity reference refers to the content ofa namea entity. References to parsed
general entities use ampersand (&) andsemicolon (;) as delimiters. Parameter-entity references use
P.ercent-sign (%) and semicolon (;) asaelimiters[671

Reference ::= EntityRef I CharRef[681

EntityRef ::= '&' Name ';'{&examples}[691

PEReference ::= '%' Name ';'{%examples}

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.,1(

> Notation Declarations <I. Notations identify by name the format of
unparsed entities, the format of elements
which bear a notation attribute, or theapplication to which a processing
instruction is addressed. Notation declarations provide a name forthe tt9tation, for use in entity andattrioute-list declarations and in attribute
specifications, and an external identifier forthe notation which may allow an XML
processor or its client application to locate
a helper application capable of processing
data m the given notation[82) NotationDecl ::= '<!NOTATION' S Name S
ExternalID I PublicID) S? '>'"33]·

PublicID ::= 'PUBLIC' S PubidLiteral

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J.1l

White Space>. s (white space) consists of 011e or more

space (#x20) characters, carnage returns,
line feeds, or tab
s ::=

[3]

I #x9 I #xD I #xA)+(ix20

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>

/Jl

Lan.211age
Identification. In document processing, it is often useful
to identify the natural or formal language inwhich the content is written. A special
attribute named xml:lang may be inserted
in documents to specify the language usedin the contents and attribute varues of any
element in an XML document::= Langcode ('-' Subcode)*[33]

LanguageID[34]

Langcode[35]

ISO639Code : := ( [a-z][36]

IanaCode ::= ('i'I 'I') '-' ([a-z]I [A-Z))+[37)

UserCode ::= ('x'I 'X') '-' ([a-z]I [A-Z))+(38]

Subcode : := ( [a-z)I [A-Z)) +::= ISO639Code I

IanaCode I

I [A-Z])( [a-z]UserCode

I [A-Z))

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> Declaring Nam esp aces <. XML namespaces are based on the use ofqualified names, which contain- a single
colon, separatin_g the name into anamespace prefix and the local name. The
prefix, which is mapped to a URI, selects anamespace. The combination of theuniversally-managed URI namespace andthe local schema namespace produces
names that are guaranteed universallyunique.
[1] NamespacePI ::= '<?xml:namespace'(S (PrefixDef I NSDef I SrcDef))+ '?>'
[2]

NSDef ::= 'ns' Eq SystemLiteral[3]

SrcDef ::= 'src' Eq SystemLiteral[4] PrefixDef ::= 'prefix' Eq( " ' " NCName " ' " I ' " ' NCName ' " ' )(5] NCName ::= (Letter I '_') (NCNameChar)*[6] NCNameChar ::= Letter I Digit I '.' I '-'I 1 ' I CombiningChar I Extender-

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-L

Overview and Management of Digltal Libraries II
A Case of NACSIS-ELS and Its On-line Journals

Jun Adachi
to be presented at IJWDL'98, 8th September ]998, AIT, Thailand

Research and Development Department
NACSIS (National Center for Science Information Systems)
3-29-1 Otsuka, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 112-8640, Japan

Abstract NACSIS initiated an Internet-based doc-

related to university library networking and union catalog databases of books and serials, and (3) the managemel}t and operation of the Internet backbone forJapanese universities.
Since April 1997 the National Center for Science
Information Systems (NACSIS) has been providing anelectronic document delivery service called NACSISELS (NACSIS Electronic Library Service). In thisservice Japanese academic journals are captured andmade available to researchers through the Internet.
NACSIS-BLS, which was developed by the staff of
NACSIS R&D Department, has a close relationshipwith the above mentioned NACSIS database activities.

ument delivery service called NACSIS-ELS (NACSIS Electronic Library Service) in April 1997. Asof August 1998, 55 Japanese academic societies are
participating in this project, and nearly 170 academic
journals are captured and made available on NACSISELS. The history of the development of NACSISELS is described after explaining general activities of
NACSIS, Japan. Then a copyright charging strategy
in this new service is discussed. Other issues related
to online journals are also mentioned such as security
protection measures, academic society activities overthe Internet.

2.1 Cataloging Services
One of the most heavily utilized services· is NACSISCAT service, which is an online catalogin~ system forthe compilation of the union catalogs of university library materials. The records of catalogs $1d holdingsof books and serials at university libraries accumulate
in databases day by day through the NACSIS-CAT
service, which started in 1984. At present, more than
400 university libraries including 94 national universities, hundreds of private universities, some interuniversity research institutions, and several public libraries are connected online to the NACSIS central
catalog database server, which stores more than 20
million holdings records in total. These records are
utilized for OPAC services at each university libraryas well.

1 Introduction
In this lecture, the author would like to introduce theactivities of_ NACSIS in tenns of online journal services and tqen to give a overview of current issues
related to online journals, in particular, pricing strategies of various services.

2 Overview of NACSIS Activities
NACSIS, which was established in 1986, is an interuniversity- research institution under the auspices of
the Japanese Ministry of Education, Science, Culture
and Sports. The major role of NACSIS is to provide support for scientists and universities in tenns of(1) information services, more specifically, compilation of scientific databases and services of online information retrieval from those databases, (2) services

2.2 Information Retrieval
The catalog databases made by libraries through
NACSIS-CAT are offered in NACSIS-IR (NACSIS

40

Information Retrieval service), which is an online information retrieval service largely for scientists andhas been operational since 1987. For example, users
can access NACSIS-IR by telnet and enjoy more than
50 scientific and scholarly databases.

(i.e., literature outside the usual distribution market,
and difficult for people to obtain easily, such as SIG
reports and conference proceedings) is of as ipuch
importance for researchers and scientists as academic
periodicals.
Therefore, NACSIS initiated the bibliographic
database compilation of Japanese gray literature.
These databases, which include information such as
paper title, author names, affiliation, and abstracts,
are mounted in NACSIS-IR, the online information
retrieval service provided by NACSIS. At present, 63
societies are participating in this database compilation. t
NACSIS has also initiated the compilation of fulltext records of articles in some scientific journals incooperation with the publishing departments of several societies.f
NACSIS proposes to use SGML format for fulltext encoding, but the number of participating journals
is limited at present. In addition, it must be admitted
that SGML database compilation is still at an experimental stage in Japan.
However, Japanese academic societies well understand that the trend is towards the electronic production _of scientific journals. NACSIS is strongly promoting this in order to expand the the compilation ofprimary information databases in science, technology
and the humanities.

2.3 Document Delivery
The service which combines catalog information andgeneral databases is NACSIS-ILL (NACSIS InterLibrary Loan service), which runs a kind of e-mailsystem for exchanging inquiries for document delivery from users to libraries. Users can issue a request
to receive photocopies of an article which he or she
has found by using NACSIS-IR. The request will besent to one of the libraries that hold the journal or theproceedings that carries the article.
University libraries have been providing photocopying services of materials for years, and NACSISILL has boosted the usage of this service by integration with online databases.

3 Cooperation with Academic Societies
3.1 Japanese Academic Societies
A major reason for government support of the activi:ies of academic societies through NACSIS operations:.s that in Japan the scale of individual societies issmall compared with those of the U.S., even though:he number of societies is more than one thousand.
Therefore, the financial state of the societies is weak,'eading to occasional difficulties in publishing mate~ials. Furthermore, Japanese societies are responsible:·or scholarly publications in the Japanese language,
md those outside Japan do not subscribe easily to:hese publications. This makes societies financially·.:;eaker in the age of the Internet, where English pre,. ails. While some societies publish journals in English, journals with an international reputation are few
2.nd most have limited subscriptions from overseas.

4 NACSIS-ELS Service and Its functions
NACSIS-ELS is one of new information services
planned by NACSIS for academic communities.
NACSIS considered that the next stage for the further dissemination of scholarly information was anelectronic journal service for Japanese academic societies. In this context, NACSIS-ELS was developed
to accumulate scholarly information such as machinereadable journal articles, proceedings and technicalreports.
The functions now available on NACSIS-ELS are
online document delivery capabilities on the Internet.
NACSIS-ELS has unique features as compared withother digital library projects which are based on conventional libraries. For example, the coverage of materials provided by NACSIS-ELS is restricted to scientific and scholarly journals, and potential users are
assumed to be mainly scientists. It has no paper-form
materials and permits access for users only throughnetworks.

3.2 NACSIS and Societies\"ACSIS is supporting the activities of Japanese acajemic societies by compiling bibliographic records of:echnical reports and conference papers that cannot be
Jbtained easily through the usual publication distribu:.'.on systems. NACSIS considers that gray literature,r Negishi, M., "Databases of NACSIS (in Japanese)," Joho-Shori,Vol. 33, No. 10, pp. 1144-1153 (1992).

t Negishi, M., "Recent development in full text database applications (in Japanese)," Joho-Shori, Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 413-420(1992),

4.1 Databases
NACSIS-ELS accumulates mainly scientific andscholarly information, such as machine-readable jour-41nal articles, proceedings and technical reports. Firstly,
the database server stores conventional bibliographic
databases that contain records comprising titles, author names, affiliations and abstracts of scientific papers. A catalog database of journals is also available.
These databases are basically the same as those provided on NACSIS-IR.
As well as these conventional databases, the server
holds page image databases of scientific journals,
which include all pages from cover page to backcover. Pages are captured in a raster image digitalformat. 400 dpi resolution data is employed for page
printouts, which is better quality than usual photocopies.
Journals are acquired from Japanese academic societies that have given NACSIS permission to use theirjournals for the NACSIS-ELS service.

browsing of pages. A hyperlink mechanism between
contents entries and corresponding pages is embedded to allow access to the first page of the requested
article from the contents.
'

4.4 Keyword Search
On the other hand, the user can initially search for papers in the same way as in conventional online information retrieval systems, i.e., using a keyword search,
Then the server will send the short informations forarticles that satisfy the query. After selecting an article to browse, its pages can be displayed in a window.
Users can retrieve documents using bibliographic information such as titles, author names, or abstracts.
Users can also issue more complex queries including
boolean operators and result sets operations.
NACSIS-ELS is therefore unique in that it provides the usual functions of the online information
retrieval systems found in NACSIS-IR, while also enabling users to browse pages on a monitor and thenprint those of interest.
A typical usual workstation monitor displays awhole A4 page in 75 dpi (dots per inch) resolution.
This is not good enough for perusal of pages. Thus,an enlargement capability is embedded in the client
software as well as page browsing functions to jump
to next, previous, and cover pages.

4.2 Functions
Documents stored in the databases are retrieved andtransmitted through high-speed wide-area networks
and users can browse articles on their workstation
monitors and users can print papers on a nearby highquality laser printer, if necessary. Therefore, this system is a superset of conventional library services suchas document delivery and photocopying services, andwill soon supplant those conventional services.
The central server provides online access to enduser workstations through the Japanese Internet, such
as SINET and university campus networks.
Transmission of images over a wide-area network
requires wider bandwidth than text or audio information due to the large size of image data. NACSIS's SINET, which is one of the Internet backbones
in Japan, was equipped in 1995 with ATM switchesand experimental 155-Mbps fiber-optic circuits, which
form the test-bed for a next-generation high-speed network.

4.5 Z39.50 Standards
To exchange database records via a network,
NACSIS-ELS employs an extended version of ANSI
Z39.50 (Information Retrieval Application Service
Definition and Protocol Specification for Open Systems Interconnection), a standard by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) which was
designed as the standard protocol for information retrieval.
The original version of ANSI Z39.50 had to be extended to handle image data, thereby making compatibility andcootdination with other Internet information
services a crucial issue. The next version of NACSISELS software, which will be released at the end of
1998, is expected to adopt Z39.50 Version 3 protocol, which will allow NACSIS-ELS users to accessother Z39.50 servers on the global Internet as well.
NACSIS-ELS also complies with ISO 8777 (Z39.58)
in query commands.

4.3 Page Browsing
Two versions of client software are available forbrowsing pages of NACSIS-ELS. One is a Z39.50
based dedicated browser, and the other is a plug-inthat works with conventional WWW browsers, suchas Netscape Navigator. Both clients are distributed
free of charge over the Internet.
With the Z39.50 browser, users can register journals they are interested in as their own environment
setting in the user profile. First the server sends
thumb-nail displays of journal cover registered in theuser profile. Clicking on one of the cover page icons
on the monitor retrieves the actual cover page of thelatest issue of the specified journal, and allows free

4.6 Hyper-links between Page Images
A general mechanism of hyper-links between pages
is to be embedded to allow users to jump from page
to page by clicking mouse buttons. This mechanism
allows the user to jump from a contents entry or a42

bibliographic reference to the corresponding page, using the page link information embedded in rectangle
areas on the pages. Since data for hyper-links are
created manually at present, it is difficult to implement this function on all pages for the· tin_ie being.
The extraction of rectangle areas on a page image
and application of OCR techniques would automate
the generation of page links and we are now considering incorporating this capability into NACSIS-ELS
software.

Concurrently, -retrospective digitization is also being experimented with. In 1995, all the pages of the
Journals of Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence
were digitized from the first issue of the Journal incelebration of the Society's 10th anniversary. Similar
projects are planned for other societies.

6 Copyright Issues in NACSIS-ELS
The definition of the copyright charging policy is oneof the major concerns of academic societies. Efforts
have been made to define a desirable policy. NACSIS is talking with not Only academic societies but
also with the organizations related to copyright issues and copyright clearance, expecting to establish
a harmonized scheme on copyright charges for scholarly information in case of online dissemination. As
of April 1998, negotiations have been settled on thewhole.

5 Brief History of Development
5.1 Development
NACSIS R&D Department started the developmentof NACSIS-ELS software in the early 90s. The first
prototype was completed in 1993.
The Information Processing Society of Japan(IPSJ), a leading Japanese academic society in thefield of computer and information science and other2 societies graciously allowed NACSIS in 1993 to
capture and store images of pages from their journals
under restricted conditions. Work is proceeding on
image database compilation of all IPSJ publications.

6.1

Overview

Copyright processing, by which fees are collectedfrom users and divided among the participating copyright holders, i.e., the academic societies, is closely
linked to service policies and technical design issues.
NACSIS has been negotiating with societies for someyears and a general scheme is already established;current discussions will determine the details of thescheme and the price setting for each service item.
NACSIS-ELS permits users to display and printout
journal pages, and the central server detects each user
action such as page display and printout, and logs de~tailed usage information. The copyright charge will
be calculated periodically based on the statistical processing of the log records. The items to be charged
and their unit charges are now under negotiation.
In the next section, issues concerning price setting
are described.

5.2 Trial Service
To evaluate the system performance of NACSIS-ELS,
trial service was started in February 1995. Under it,
selected users are provided with online access to 56
titles of journals through SINET. Based on user evaluations of system functionality and performance, thesystem is being developed further in an effort to offer a fully functional service. More than 300 users
were participating in the evaluation of NACSIS-ELS.
In the trial service, no copyright charges are applied
to monitor users. This trial ended in March 1997.

5.3 Service Operation
NACSIS launched the full service of NACSIS-ELS in
April 1997.
As of August 1998, about 7000 users are registered
to the server. Fifty-five societies are participating in
NACSIS-ELS, and other 56 societies are under consideration for participation. Nearly 170 journals will
be digitized. Most of them will be soon available on
the Internet this year. We have already digitized overl million pages. In 1998, additional 500 thousand
pages are to be digitized. Since discussion with societies on copyright charging issues is still going on,
there is no charge for the time being. NACSIS-ELS
intends to institute a system of charges from January
1999.

6.2 Concerns of Academic Societies
In summary, the concerns of societies in regard to
NACSIS-ELS are the potentialities of (1) losing journal subscriptions and (2) a decrease in members because of far easier access to the information producedby the societies.
However, NACSIS anticipates that NACSIS-ELS
will boost the activities of academic societies without
negative influences and is continuing to discuss theprice setting strategy with the societies involved.

6.3 Principles
The copyrights of materials should already be transferred from individual authors of articles to the societies. NACSIS will compile a database of journals

43

that are newly issued after the contract is closed. Retrospective digitization is considered separately fromthe digitization of forthcoming journal issues. Thisis because many Japanese societies do not yet haveclearly enacted copyright transfer contratts between
authors and societies, and the contracts for retrospective conversion tend to be complicated and timeconsuming.
The tentative scheme includes two different kindsof user profile. The first is an individual user model,
the second an institutional use model. We will discuss
the advantages and disadvantages of both models interms of dissemination of academic information.

concerns of societies caused by the unsettling transition towards electronic journals. Unfortunately we
do not yet have fixed levels of access charges forscientific information. It talces time to reach priceequilibrium for online journals.
As online journals become more commonplace, societies may consider that they can earn more income
through such services and they may set lower charges,
more acceptable for general users. NACSIS considers that the early launching of journal digitization ismost important in providing useful databases for researchers.
Some societies, however, do not have such concerns and simply regard NACSIS-ELS as a new way
to boost society activities and communication among
members. In such cases, societies will have no hesitation in setting the charges at a low and reasonablerate.
In the near future, electronic cash transactions will
be employed with copyright protection capability embedded in the image data. This will enable us to makethe charging procedure even simpler.

7 Two Models for Use
7.1

Individual User Model

Several charging models are observed in Internetbased information services at present. One model isa service free of charges. When charges are applied,
some services are provided on a fixed monthly ratewith user access control. In the case of NACSISELS, we will adopt a pay-per-use policy with user
access control.
Thus, a user account and a password will be given
to each registered user and he or she will pay a copyright charge according to the amount of usage. Thisis identical with conventional commercial information
retrieval services. The collected charge will be distributed among academic societies in proportion to theusage of their materials.
According to the tentative agreement, societies define unit charges separately for page displays and page
printouts; they can differentiate charges depending onjournal titles and page attributes such as content pages,
article pages and announcement pages.
As well, societies can offer discount rates for members. They can also define the delay in information availability on the Internet after print publication.
Those societies concerned about losing subscriptions
can set this delay for a longer period, for instance, sixmonths.
This more complicated system has been adopted
instead of a common page charge for every journal
in order to provide an incentive for societies to participate in this project. For societies concerned aboutlosing members, they can set the page access freeof charge for members; those societies that generally
fear the negative effects of online journals can set
page charges prohibitively high. This will discourage
users from using those societies' online journals.
Although such measures for price setting may confuse users in browsing pages, they will alleviate the

7.2 Problems of Individual User Model
Since the individual user model described above wasbased on conventional information retrieval services,
total payments by users tend to be higher than in thecase of using print publications at libraries in universities and research institutions.
The problem is one of who pays for the information usage. Issuing accounts for individual users only
will not expand the NACSIS-ELS service. University
libraries cannot afford to pay for all usage by students
and patrons, because the charge tends to be high andit is difficult to estimate the necessary total. Therefore, the individual user model will apply only fora limited number of researchers who have sufficientfinancial resources to pay for online journals.

7.3 Institutional Use Model
The institutional use model was created following theconventional journal subscription model. Institutions
pay an annual fixed charge for journal use. Societies
define the rate according to the nature of the institution
and the number of potential users. People attachedto the institutions can access the subscribed journals
freely. For non-subscribed journals they have to pay
charges according to the individual user model.
The advantages of the institutional use model are:(1) institutions can estimate the necessary annual
budget for information usage and can select journals to which they wish to subscribe;44(2) societies can estimate the annual income from institutional users, thus making their financial state
more stable; and(3) NACSIS can reduce the workload necessary to
calculate usage and to distribute the charges
among societies.
NACSIS is continuing discussions on this model withacademic societies and the institutional use model will
be incorporated into the NACSIS-ELS charging tariffin the near future.

8.4 Diversity of Online Public;,tjons
Recently, several publishers have ~egun to provide
electronic materials, and commercial servers' are already working with a small number of journal titles.
Too many servers with small collections would not
make it easier for users to have access to a wide variety of materials. This would be so because users
need to contract with numbers of service agents, andsystem usages tend to be different.
To establish globally distributed digital libraries,in which people can search for and browse all kindsof materials according to their interests, we have toconsider equipping the NACSIS-ELS system with thefollowing functionalities:(1) an archiving function in different sites;(2) an appropriate control function for avoiding access concentration;(3) a function to avoid modification of information;(4) a function to avoid illegal modification of information; and(5) uniform and common access functions to distributed servers.
In parallel with these technical developments, asystem to control intellectual property rights will be
required to establish economically viable distributed
digital libraries that are also acceptable from a user's
point of view.

8 Other Issues
8.1 Service Schedule
Until copyright charges for electronic journals are defined, the service is provided free of charge. Participating societies have accepted this proposal by NACSIS favorably.
In 1998, the individual user model charging system
will be introduced. We will implement further detailsof the institutional use model by analyzing the usage
profile and experience of the NACSIS-ELS service.

8.2 Society Activities over the Internet
Through discussion with the societies, we have foundthat the real problem is what role academic societies
will play in the digital age. Some societies alreadypermit members to provide their papers on their personal web sites. Strictly speaking, this may violate
the copyright of the societies.
Some societies may alter and/or intensify theircharacter as scientific publishers; others may makemore efforts to strengthen communication among
members in various media and to expand their publicity and educational activities through a variety of
networks.
NACSIS will monitor such metamorphoses of academic societies and update the characteristics of the
NACSIS-ELS service.

9 Concluding Remarks
NACSIS-ELS can be categorized as an online document delivery system integrated with bibliographic
databases, specially designed for scholarly publications. The full-fledged service of NACSIS-ELS, including copyright charge collection, is scheduled tostart in October, will expedite the dissemination ofscholarly information and facilitate easy access toJapanese scholarly publications, in particular, academic journals written in English for overseas scientists.
Although we give a higher priority to the digitization of current issues for the time being, retrospective digitization is also considered. Several titles havebeen already converted in digital form from their firstissues.
The latest information concerning the NACSISELS project can be accessed on WWW with URL:

8.3 Technical Issues
Although password control and encryption of document images are employed in NACSIS-ELS, further
complicated measures for ensuring security, such asembedding an electronic watermark into images, are
not applied.
This technology may become necessary for a moresecure service of copyrighted materials, but for thetime being we are not introducing further measures
for this purpose. It is unclear how people will accept
this kind of technology and we are prepared to employ
more secure capability into NACSIS-ELS if increased
public acceptance indicates its necessity.

http://www.nacsis.ac.jp/.

45

WOR SHOPIJWDL'98
International Joint Workshop on Digital Libraries 1998
7-9 September 1998
Asian Institute of Technology
Bangkok, Thailand

A Digital Library for K-12 Educators:
the PEN-DOR project
Myron Bright, Karen Fullerton, Jane Greenberg, Maureen McClure,
Edie Rasmussen and Darin Stewart
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Abstract

PEN-DOR (the Pennsylvania Education Digital Object Repository) is a digital
library designed to provide access to the collective experience of teachers, students
and administrators in public schools in building lesson plans and using curriculum
materials. Using the WWW as a platform, PEN-DOR incorporates current researchin digital libraries to provide K-12 educators with access to multimedia resources
and tools to create new lesson plans and presentations, and to modify existing ones.
The project is based on a distributed, object-oriented database architecture which
supports the description and cataloguing of multimedia objects, and their use insupport of teaching. The PEN-DOR project has elected to base its work on the
GEM (Gateway to Educational Materials) metadata standard developed as part of
the GEM union catalog project.Content for the database is solicited fromgovernment agencies and project partners, as well as from participating teachers.
Once incorporated in the repository, materials can be organized in frameworks
which form the basis for lessons, tutorials and presentations. As frameworks aredeveloped, used, critiqued and modified, they will form a community memory of pastexperience. Critical issues include considerations of copyright, and usability andtraining for a geographically scattered user community. Supported by the state's
Link-to-Learn program, the system will function as a resource for educators
throughout Pennsylvania.

47

Recent developments in scholarly publishingand their impact on libraries
Fytton Rowland
Department ofInformation and Library Studies
Loughborough University, UK
Introduction

What is scholarly publishing? I would
define scholarly publications as publishedmaterials, in whatever medium, that are
not primarily pedagogic in their purpose,and the content of which assumes a levelof background knowledge of their subject
such that only a university graduate in that
subject could reasonably be expected tounderstand them fully. Such publications
may be relatively long, in which case in
their printed forms we would refer to themas books, or they may be relatively brief inwhich case we would call them articles or
papers. In their printed versions sucharticles are usually, but not invariably,grouped together into issues of journals,
and these issues usually, but notinvariably, come out at regular statedintervals and therefore can be called"periodicals" as well as "serials". Verycommonly, but not invariably, an
academic publication represents the firstfull report of the results of a piece of
research, and can thus be accorded another
title, that of a "primary publication". But
scholarly publications can also be of areview nature, bringing together lots ofpieces of published resl:?arch, summarisingthem, analysing them, and putting theminto a structure. Such documents -- which
again can be of a book form or of an article
form -- are referred to as tertiary
publications. In most fields, scholarly
books are usually tertiary; primary
publication in book form is nowadays
unusual except in some fields in thehumanities and perhaps the social sciences.

Those of us who study scholarly
communication tend to concentrate on thejournal, rather than the book, perhaps
because a lot of us came out of thesciences where journal publication is more
important than book publication. Both theacademic book and the scholarly journal
have been amazingly stable media.
Despite advances in the technologies bywhich they are pro du c e d andmanufactured, the products themselves
have remained remarkably similar incharacter and appearance for centuries.
But in the 1990s there have been rapidchanges, at least in expectation if not yet inreality, in academic publication, and thebrief term that can be used to describe
these changes is "electronic publishing".
And as you no doubt have been expecting,that is what I am principally going to talkabout today.
It should be noted that traditional scholarly
publications come from a variety of typesof publisher. In the science, technology
and medicine (STM) area, in particular,
for-profit publishers are very active since
the publications tend to be very profitable,
owing to their attraction to practitioners
and to large industrial companies as wellas to academic libraries. As "publish or
perish" has spread, demand for outlets foracademics in other fields has grown, so theinterests of these publishers havebroadened to take in the social sciences
and humanities too.
There have been
many takeovers and mergers so that afairly small number of large international48

companies now dominate the STM
publishing scene. But there have always
been high-quality publications produced
by not-for-profit organisations, among
them university presses and learned
societies. Some of the smaller societies
publish through a commercial publisher,taking advantage of the marketing anddistribution systems of the larger
organisation.
Other societies, even
including some quite small ones, publish
themselves.
There are an enormous
number of very small non-profit publishersof academic material, and this presents a
problem when technological; innovation isrequired; these small organisations lackboth the financial capital and theknowledge to convert their journals toelectronic form. It also needs to be noted
that, while these publishers are "not-forprofit", they also need to be "not-for-loss"
unless they have access to some form offinancial subsidy. National journals insmall countries sometimes do enjoy
subsidy, for example. But in general, atleast a quasi-commercial attitude isrequired in order that the non-profit
organisation can continue to publish theirjournals.

function of any publication that will
most readily spring to the mind of any
librarian
Second, the preservation and archivingof that information -- ensuring that itremains available for many years after
its publication•

Third, quality control -- ensuring thatthe information is correct and reliable•

Finally, recognition and priority for theauthors -- evidence that these people
did this work and had these ideas, anddid so first

Academics themselves almost invariably,
in my observation, tend to think of the
fourth function first -- if you ask
academics their opinion of journals, they
will always think first in terms of "Wheredo I publish?" rather than "What do I
read?" Some commentators are rather
scathing about this tendency -- criticisingthe "publish or perish" mentality andmaintaining that most papers are read by
nobody except the authors, the editors andthe referees -- and not even always by
them! I prefer to take a neutral stand -- asan information scientist, I make scientificobservations of the system as it is, rather
than value judgements about whether it isa good or bad thing that it is so. Any
proposals for change in the system, orpredictions about what might happen in
the future, need to take note of all thefunctions.
As my colleague Cliff
McKnight (McKnight, 1994) has observed,
electronic journals must at least fulfil all of
the functions of the printed journals;
preferably they should do more, but theymust not do less.

The purposes of the scholarly article

However, before we launch into the mainpart of the talk, there is one point thatneeds to be thought about. We will notthink clearly about the future of academic
publishing unless we are clear about what
it is for. Many scholars, including in the
UK Jerry Ravetz (Ravetz, 1973) of theOpen University, John Ziman (Ziman,
1968) of the University of Bristol, and myown distinguished Loughboroughcolleague Jack Meadows (Meadows,1980), have noted that the purposes of thescholarly article are in fact fourfold.
••

The electronic journal
First a word about the electronic book

First, and most obviously, thedissemination of information -- the49

The main thrust of my talk will be theelectronic journal, but first a very brief
word about the electronic book. There are,of course, electronic books; for example
the Encarta Encyclopedia on CD-ROM ishugely successful, and electronic
multimedia versions of classic children'sbooks on CD-ROM are also selling well.
But there is no detectable trend towards
publication of the academic monograph inelectronic form, although many publishers
have web sites advertising their books. ·Monographs -- despite that word -- areoften multiauthored, with different experts
contributing different chapters, but thebook has an overall structure and theme
decided upon by its academic editor. One
kind of book that is likely to become
electronic, however, is the conference
proceedings volume. Although these havetraditionally been published as books, they
are of course more akin to journals in thatthey contain many different papers fromdifferent authors describing different
pieces of research. They have a general ..
theme, of course, but unlike amultiauthored monograph they do not havea strong directing editor. Many conference
organisers are now making their papers
available on the World Wide Web, before
or after the conference or both, and insome case this form of publication is
replacing print publication of aproceedings book. This is a case where
the ease of mounting material on the
WWW, even by relative amateurs, is very
helpful in achieving prompt and cheap
publication. In many cases conference
proceedings are not really a commercial
proposition for publishers, either.

The Information Explosion -~ now
rechristened Information Overload -- hasbeen talked of since the 1950s, if not
before. Once the computer was invented,
scientists naturally thought of using it tohelp cope with their problem of too muchinformation. Electronic versions of the
major scientific abstracts and indexes
journals have existed since the end of the
1960s, and online information retrieval
services operating in real time, based on
those secondary databases, have been
operated by Dialog and its competitorssince the mid- l 970s. Given the obvious
advantages of searchability and spacesaving, to name only two, it is unsurprisingthat information specialists then began toturn their minds to the possibility of
producing electronic equivalents of the
primary journal as well. In about 1976-77
the first couple of experiments in online
primary journals began, and John Senders(Senders, 1977) made his famous comment"I have seen the future and it doesn'twork". He was, of course, right -- and it
still doesn't work very well.
The
difficulties in these early years were
essentially as follows.

Moving on to the main theme, electronic
journals, I will now deal with theirdevelopment historically.

Early experiments

50·•

The only network generally available
was the voice telephone network,
which then consisted of copper wire
and Strowger electromechanicalswitches.
The charges for longdistance calls were high and the qualityof lines unpredictable.

•

Few scholars had ready access tocomputers, and fewer still could
connect them in any way to the
network.

•

The early microcomputers -- Apple 2sand •commodore Pets among others -were incompatible with mainframes
and with each other. The software
could not easily exchange files
between different types of machines,which were not designed for mixedplatform networking•

Neither the hardware nor the software
could, in general, cope with anythingother than alphanumeric ch~acters:
graphics of any sort were very hard to
display•

Neither publishers nor libraries were
equipped to handle electronic
publications. Some journals were still
printed using hot metal; even where
computer typesetting was already inuse, every proprietary system used its
own codes and all were mutually
incompatible.

academic readers via the Internet at no
direct cost.
(There were, of course,
indirect: costs such as the provision toacademics of PCs, network connections
and national and international academic
networks, but it was assumed that this was
happening anyway.) Advocates of thisapproach, notably Stevan Hamad (Hamad,
1996), then at Princeton but now atSouthampton University in the UK, andJean-Claude Guedon of l'Universite deMontreal in Canada, said that each journal
could be edited · by its academic editor(such as Hamad or Guedon themselves),
mounted on the Internet using generally
available and user-friendly software, anddownloaded for reading or printing byinterested readers anywhere in the world
without the intervention of either apublisher or a library. It is indeed the casethat a..substantial number of new journalsof this kind have been established.
Originally, in 1990-91, they tended to
publicise themselves initially on suitable email discussion groups; they then set up
their own discussion group for the journal
itself, to which interested readers wereinvited to subscribe; this e-mail list thenreceived the contents pages and abstractsof each issue of the journal, and the fullarticles including graphics could be
downloaded using anonymous ftp. This
was not especially user friendly, and when
first gopher and then the World Wide Webcame along the embryonic electronic
journals quickly switched to thesefriendlier packages.

The BLEND (Shackel, 1991) and Quartet(Tuck et al., 1990) experiments, withwhich Loughborough university washeavily involved, were major British
electronic publishing experiments.
Despite these problems, much was learned
by the early experimenters. In particularthey investigated the possibilities forinteractive journals -- that is, where thereaders could respond to, annotate andcriticise the published papers. projects ofthis era. This is a theme to which I will
return at the very end of my talk.

The "free" journals
As the Internet began to develop andbecome widely available, and highspecification PCs came down in price, atthe beginning of the 1990s some scholars
began to advocate a completely new
method of scholarly publication. Arguingthat most scholarly journals were ofinterest to only a few people throughout
the world, they felt that he commercial
system of publication of scholarly primary
articles was inappropriate; copies weresold at high prices to university libraries,
when it was feasible to distribute the samematerial direct from academic authors to

New commercial journals
Over the years since the emergence of theWorld Wide Web -- since say 1992/93 -- anumber of new electronic-only journals
have been established by the major
scholarly journal publishers, such as
Oxford University Press and Springer
Verlag. It has to be said, however, that
there are not a large number of these. The
51

reasons might be: (1) It is difficult for any
new journal -- paper or electronic,
published by a commercial or a non-profit
publisher, to get established; unless there
is an obvious gap in the market, it is hard
to compete with established titles. (2)Charging methods for purely electronic
journals are only just emerging, and it isdifficult for the publishing to get pricing
structures and pricing levels right. In ourown field, I might mention the Journal of
Digital Information, JoDJ, edited by my
Loughborough colleague Professor Cliff
McKnight jointly with Professor Wendy
Hall of Southampton University, andpublished in association with Oxford
University Press. I think the jury is stillout on the question of whether suchjournals can pay their way: even traditional
printed journals took up to five years to
break even from their initial foundation, so
it would be surprising if ones founded in
the new medium could be in the black yet.

often will be the titles and abstracts of theindividual papers. Sometime a few papers
will al~o be available free of charge as"tasters", but the general run of papers infull text will be _available only to paying
customers, and access is protected byeither a password system or checking of IP
addresses of the customer's machine.
Paying mechanisms also vary and are
discussed later. The most usual format forthe presentation of the full texts is PDF(publications distribution format) which isderived from Postscript and handled by
the Adobe Acrobat software.
This
preserves the page layout of the printed
publication (so-called page integrity) but
allows searching of the full text. Contents
pages and free abstracts, on the other hand,
are usually in HTML, which is quicker todownload than PDF but does not preserve
the appearance of the printed original -- theappearance will depend on the user's
browser settings. Some, but not many,
journals provide an HTML alternative forthe full texts, and some publishers have
opted for other page-integrity systems,
notably RealPage from the software house
CatchWord.

Dual journals

Where there has been the most rapid
growth, however, is in well-known, wellestablished journals from the traditional
academic publishers, in both the for-profit
and the not-for-profit sectors, being madeavailable in electronic form in parallel totheir continued publication in printed
form. Most of the significant publishers inthe scholarly journals business have by
now made their journals electronicallyavailable, a few from 1995, more from1996, many more from 1997, and somerelative laggards from 1998. I will discuss
the question of payment for these journals
later.

New features

A major argument for electronic journals -whether free or for fee -- is that anelectronic publication can do things that a
printed one cannot. First among these
considerations is full-text searchability.
Secondly, a structure of hypertext links,
both within and between documents, canbe put in place, and work at Southampton
University, for example, is looking into thepossibilities of separating out the link
structures from the actual content itself.
Thirdly, multimedia content is possible -an article can contain video, sound andanimations as well as text and still
pictures. Fourthly, fuller data can be
included which it would be uneconomic toprint. Finally, articles can contain runtime

Details, vary, but typically a publisher will
make available the full text and graphics ofall the papers -- but not always all theancillary matter -- on the World Wide
Web. The entry screens to the publisher'ssite will typically be freely available, as
52

versions of software, a 11 owing
manipulation of the data by the user, or theuser can extract data from publishedsources and manipulate them using
software of the user's choosing.

Even before the emergence of large
numbers of formal scholarly journals
published over the Internet, academics
had been quick to adopt the Internet as atool for their work. Electronic mail has
transformed academic co-operation: it is
now possible cheaply and easily tocommunicate with colleagues throughout
the world on a close to real-time basis. Email discussion lists extend the one-to-one
e-mail concept to communication within agroup of people sharing an interest. Ideas
can be tossed around, data distributed,
drafts of articles circulated among
dispersed authors, and so on, withconvenience.
More formal "computer
supported co-operative work" (CSCW)
using software like Lotus Notes, or moresophisticated equipment such as
whiteboards on which all parties can write,
each at their own terminal, andcinecameras attached to machines so thatthe participants can see and talk to eachother at the same time as they work on
their PCs, are leading to what has beentermed "collaboratories". There is little
doubt that these advances have improved
academic research productivity. It is,however, important to distinguish between
this kind of informal discussion andpublication. As I argued in an article lastyear in Ariadne (Rowland, 1997), we must
remember that many real-world decisions
depend on the availability of publisheddata of known quality and reliability. Thisis perhaps more true in the physicalsciences than in the social sciences. But I
would not like to see government making
significant changes in social policy based
purely on rumour and Internet chat. One
would like to see rigorous social-science
research being used to underpin policy.
This means that the published results ofsuch research have to be subject to quality
control and then made available, in thelong term, in ways that prevent theirsubsequently being altered, by their own
author or anyone else. This is not to say,

Informal communication

There is a body of opinion, whom one
might call "Internet libertarians", who
believe that formal publication of scholarlymaterial is no longer necessary in theInternet era. Everyone can, and should,
publish their own views on their own
World Wide Web site, or within suitable email discussion lists, and nobody shouldbe allowed to censor what they say. The
refereeing procedures applied bypublishers of traditional academic books
and journals are an anachronism resulting
from the previously unavoidable costs ofprinting; because printing and distributionof print publications are expensive, spacein them has to be rationed. Space on theInternet is effectively infinite, soeverybody can be allowed to say as muchas they want to without restriction.
Obviously this is a caricature of the
viewpoint.
However, it does raise aserious point. Did traditional scholarly
publishing silence heterodox views? Does
electronic publication offer a new andvaluable academic freedom?
Can theInternet provide help for the "little person"
against the big battalions, of governments
or of large corporations? I do think that it
is important to recognise the enormous
value o f i m p r o v e d i n f o r m a 1
communication between scholars. But it
also important to know the difference
between the informal discussion andformal publication, and to value both.
E-mail discussion lists and newsgroups

53This may militate against good sales ofphysics journals in electronic form:of course, that online comment anddiscussion of the published results would
not be an enhancement of a journal.
Indeed, as we have seen, this possibility
was one of the first features of electronic
journals to be investigated in the earlyexperiments such as BLEND (Shackel,1991).

WWW sites
It is a commonplace among those of us
who teach undergraduates at the end of the
1990s that it become increasingly difficult
to persuade them to look anywhere otherthan the World Wide Web for all theinformation that they require!
Even
Information and Library Studies students
prefer the World Wide Web to the library.
Nevertheless, it has to be remembered that
WWW sites occupy border territory
between formal and informal
communication. Sites of major research
universities, "resource discovery" sites like
SOSIG (social sciences) or OMNI
(medicine) in the UK, and the sites ofmajor scholarly publishers clearly doprovide access to information of tested
quality. At the other end of the scale,personal web sites of private individuals
may simply reflect their own personal
prejudices and enthusiasms, without any
guarantee of accuracy or objectivity for the
information contained

Preprint exchanges
Long before the emergence of thecomputer as an information-handling tool,
scholars had circulated drafts of theirpapers to each other for comment, andafter the arrival of the photocopier, it
became possible for authors to send out
substantial numbers of copies of their draft
papers to professional colleagues.
However, as this occurred in advance of
the acceptance of papers by a journal, thequality control element was missing -- thepaper might not have been published in thesame form, or at all.
Thus they were
known as preprints. Efforts were madefrom time to time to systematise thepreprint distribution process, but manyscholars opposed this on the grounds that it
did circumvent the quality control
procedure.

Blurring of the boundaries: is it a goodthing?

Recently, with the general availability indeveloped countries of Internet
connections, and word-processing software
enabling almost all academic authors to
prepare their articles in machine-readable
form, the pre-print exchanges have become
electronic. In high-energy physics, inparticular, the exchange organised by theLos Alamos laboratory in the USA has
become the major current-awareness toolof the discipline (Ginsparg, 1994). Papers
can be read on the Los Alamos server
many months before the appearance of thejournal, and thus the journals themselves
are tending to be purely archival devices.

I believe that both informal discussion
among academics, and formal publicationof research results, are necessary for thegood health of the scholarly enterprise.
One does not replace the other. Returning
to Cliff McKnight's (1994) principle thatthe electronic publication must at least do
all the things that the printed on does, andJack Meadows' (1980) list of the functionsof the scholarly journal. we see thatelectronic scholarly journals must provide
for the dissemination, archiving, quality
control and recognition functions of theprint journal. In principle they can do allthese things, but only if a proper degree offormality exists. Electronic discussion,
54

and the free and uncensored expression of
opinion, are good things in their own right.
They do not replace, however, thepublication of tested, authenticated data,
whether in the physical or the social
sciences. The humanities may be a rather
different matter; but there too, presumably,
academic authors would want to ensurethat their own views are accurately
presented and not subject to subsequent
tampering or misrepresentation by others.
(This is the concept of moral rights,
enshrined in European Union copyrightlegislation.)a link to it in the library's own web pages.
At Loughborough, the library has a web
page Galled "Electronic Journals" with alink from the library's home page. The
electronic journals page in tum gives
access to four more pages: one for freejournals, one for sample free issues ofcommercial journals to which the library
does not subscribe, one for the Blackwell'sNavigator service (of which more later),and one for commercial publishers'
services to which the library does
subscribe, whether through the Pilot Site
Licence Initiative or otherwise. The freejournals page in tum lists by name thosefree journals which, in the academic
librarians' judgement, are not only relevant
to subjects studied at Loughborough, butalso of an adequate academic standard tobe worthy or recommendation. There arethen links directly from the name of ajournal to its own home page. Other
universities do something similar. In somecases, however, academic departments
may do the job themselves rather thanleaving it to the library. The department ofchemistry at Cambridge University in theUK, for example, has an excellent
chemistry resources site, with links tochemical electronic journals among manyother things.

One thing that does seem clear is that
academics are . using all the informal
channels themselves, without theintervention of librarians. Some may needtraining in the use of the IT and Internet
facilities involved, and this training may
be given by their campus Computing
Service or by the library, depending on
local circumstances.
Once they aretrained, though, they will in all likelihood
do their own netsurfing.
Financial considerations}vfeans .ofpayment
Returning, then, to the formal electronic
journals, what is the involvement of thelibrary with them?

The complicated work for libraries arises if
paid-for electronic journals are provided.
To buy print journals libraries mostly use
subscription agents. These companies
reduce the administrative burden of
dealing with multiple publishers, at a
relatively modest charge, by acting as a
middleman (or hub, in airline parlance)
between lots of libraries and lots ofpublishers. Now that all the major ones
are fully computerised their services arevery efficient.

In the case of the free ones, there does notinevitably have to be any library
involvement: users can access them
directly over the Internet without
formality. However, not all potential users
necessarily know how, and some may noteven know that they exist -- one importantrole of commercial publishers ismarketing, and for free journals thisactivity may not be done, or not done well.
So the library can tell its users that thejournal exists, and smooth their way
towards using it, most likely by includingWith electronic journals the situation ismuch less tidy. Publishers clearly have
not realised55

what an enormous burden of unnecessary
and unproductive work it gives to libraries
if they have to deal with every publisher
separately -- especially if publishers'
systems are incompatible with one another.
(And let us not forget that publishers,
accused of overpricing, often suggest thatlibraries should spend more on purchases
and less on staff.)allow their customers to do different things
and forbid different things. This is very
difficult for librarians, as their users
naturally do not understand why they can
do something with one of their favourite
journals but are forbidden to do the samething with another from a different
publisher.
Publishers are naturally
concerned about illicit copies of theircontent escaping and thus undermining
their revenue, and so try to restrict accesswithin universities. This can be done, forexample, by requiring the library to issue
all users with individual passwords, or by
only allowing access from machines withthe appropriate IP addresses that associatethem with a subscribing university. Somehave tried to insist on access frommachines actually physically located in thelibrary, but this has been abandoned
because it negates the main advantage ofelectronic publishing -- access at the user's
own desk. Some find it difficult to copewith a type of user who use many different
machines all over the campus at different
times, unpredictably. This type of user iscalled a student, using open-access PC
labs. Some have tried to limit the numberof simultaneous accesses by users within
the same university. In one case they aretrying to limit this to one user to any one
title at a time -- an access far inferior tothat provided with print journals, where
after all one reader can be consulting
volume 27 while another reads volume 34!
This seems to me an offer that customers
are bound to refuse.

The payment options offered are generally
these -- though not all publisher
necessarily offer all the options.
Annual subscription to individual journals,
as with the print products. Within thisoption, there may be the choice of buying
the print and the electronic version, theprint only, or the electronic only. But notalways -- one publisher at least is now
making everyone pay for the electronic
version -- at an extra charge, naturally -whether they want it or not; the option of
buying only the print has gone. Another -a very reputable American learned society-- lets you buy electronic alone, but theprint version is now an add-on, naturally at
an extra charge, and cannot now be boughtalone. Many will not let you buy theelectronic without the print.
Subscription to all of the publishers'
journals in electronic form. If this option
is taken, there is a saving over the total
cost of buying them separately. But ofcourse publishers (other than learned
society publishers) do not cover just one
discipline nor does any one publisher
usually produce all the journals in any one
discipline.
The publisher's stable ofjournals is a rag-bag of journals acrossmiscellaneous fields. It is unlikely any
library -- except the very biggest ones -would actually want all of the journals
from any one publisher.

National or regional site licensing or
consortium purchasing. In response to thekind of difficulties that I have just been
describing, another option is being
examined in many parts of the world:
national or regional site licensing or
consortium purchasing.
In the USA
groups of universities are banding together
in consortia to gain bargaining power withpublishers, and Elsevier, indeed, areTerms of different publishers' licenceagreements vary: different publishers will56

insisting that they do so as they do notwant the administrative burden of dealing
with 2,000 US universities any more than
any university wants the burden of dealing
with 30,000 publishers.

Computing Centre at Manchester
University will deal with technical aspects,
mounting the NESLI homepages,
maintaining the hypertext links with all the
publishers, providing search facilities thatwill work across all the publishers, and soon. NESLI' s work has only just started
but it is clear that negotiations withpublishers will be very tough. A Standard
Licence has been drawn up, but individual
publishers may negotiate different terms.

In the UK the Pilot Site Licence Initiative(PSLI Evaluation Team, 1997) has beenrunning for a couple of years now withfour publishers: Academic Press, Instituteof Physics Publishing, Blackwell's andBlackwell's Science. These publishers
agreed to supply their journals -- print andelectronic -- to all UK higher educational
institutions in return for a payment madeto them centrally by the Funding Councils.
In Academic Press's case, no further
payment was requested from theuniversities -- i.e. they received a 100%
discount off the normal prices -- while theother three publishers provided reduced
subscriptions (i.e. discounts of less than
l 00%). This project, seen as a pilot
scheme as its name suggests, wascontroversial because it was compulsory - that is, the funds were top-sliced by the
Finding Councils so that universities wereindirectly paying for these journals
whether they wanted them or not.

Pay-per-view or pay-per-print. This option

is being provided by many publishers inrecognition of the fact that private
individuals, or indeed small companies or
institutions, may wish to have occasional
access to a journal to which they would not
subscribe. Thus the option of paying justfor the one item that you happen to want isalso made available. Some American
information professionals call this pay-perdrink -- what you do when you buy asingle whisky in a bar rather than buying abottle of whisky in a liquor store. This
option of course blurs the distinction
between publishing and document delivery
services like those of British Library
Document Supply Centre in Boston Spa,
UK, and other commercial suppliers.
There are technical problems because of
the difficulty of collecting micropayments-- that is, the administrative cost ofcollecting a small amount of money far
exceeds the amount paid.
However,
information technology will probably
provide a solution here, as many softwarehouses are developing Internet
micropayment systems to enable people topay small sums by credit card at a very
low administrative overhead cost. Security
is also a problem, as many people do notwish to key their credit card number into
the Internet which is known to be leaky.
Again, software houses are working on
appropriate systems for secure Internet
payments using encryption technology.

Now the National Electronic Site Licence
Initiative, NESLI, is offering a voluntaryalternative (Friedgood, 1998).
The
Funding Councils are providing pumppriming money for three years to set up
what might become a self-funding scheme
eventually. This time it deals only withelectronic subscriptions -- the printed
versions are not involved at all. This in
itself is proving difficult as many
publishers do not wish to decouple print
and electronic subscriptions.
Twomanaging agents have been appointed -Swets and Zeitlinger, the subscription
agent, will look after negotiations with
universities and publishers (acting as theuniversity libraries' agent) andadministrative aspects, while Manchester57

At one time it was suggested that thismethod of payment might completely
replace the subscription methods. It is
now recognised that such a scenario would
not provide either publisher or library withstability. The publisher needs to know that
there is enough firm revenue coming in tocover the "first-copy cost" -- that is, thecost of putting the information producttogether in the first place.
The
subscription basis provides for that, andalso provides publishers with a positive
cash flow -- subscriptions are paid at the
beginning of the year while costs are
incurred throughout the year. It also
provides libraries, which are usually notrevenue-earning departments, with stableand budgetable costs; the library willknow in advance how much money its
institution will give it for the year, andtherefore needs to know how much it isgoing to be have to spend on journals, inorder to budget. Pay-per-view does notprovide such predictability.
However,
pay-per-view as an alternative to
subscriptions is attractive to publishers,
since it offers the possibility of newrevenue sources -- individuals or
institutions that otherwise would not havepurchased the title at all now provide itwith some revenue, even if only a small
amount.
A large number of small
payments that the publisher might nototherwise have received at all could be an
important extra revenue source, which inturn could either increase the publishers'
profit or allow them to set subscription
rates lower than they would otherwise
have had to.

(Rowland et al., 1996; Meadows et al.,
1997; Woodward et al., 1998b) suggeststhat they don't use them, mainly becauseIeither they do not know that they exist -remember marketing is a key role ofpublishers -- or because they don't know
how to use them -- remember user
education is a key role of libraries.
But it is clear that the swing away fromcommercial scholarly publishing to thefree variety will be slow and probably will
not be complete. Indeed, as has been
noted, even the current free ones may haveto institute modest charges when theirsubsidies cease. And if there is any charge
at all, then there will be administrationneeded to deal with the payment andcollection of the money. In the UK, atleast, it is unlikely in the extreme that
academics will be willing to pay forjournals out of their private pockets.
Students too can reasonably expect thataccess to scholarly journals is one of thethings they are paying their tuition fees for.
Thus some part of the university structure
will have to deal with the negotiation withpublishers, with the making of decisions
on which products to buy and which not tobuy, and with ensuring that the accesswhich they have paid for is actually
reliably provided. The obvious part of theuniversity structure to perform these tasks
is the library. And of course library staff
are the obvious people to advise staff andstudents on the choice af information
resources to use -- as they always havedone -- and to teach them how to accessthem. This too was always necessary -few students arrive at university with anintimate knowledge of the Dewey DecimalClassification! And the user-training role
becomes greater as alarge variety of electronic products areprovided. They should, no doubt, be userfriendly and transparent, but they are not;and as technological obsolescence grows
ever faster, there is little chance that any

Who needs libraries?

It has been suggested by some people thatlibraries would be unnecessary because
everyone could simply access the freeelectronic journals on the Internet forthemselves. This is true, but experience at
Loughborough in various users studies

58

users unaided will be able to keep up withthe avalanche of change. It will always
fall to an information expert to keep up
with the changes and organise ongoingtraining programmes for users. And who
is better qualified to do this than thelibrary staff?

warehouse, the only place to get a· copy isfrom a library. It seems reasonable tosuggest that libraries should proYide
archival access to electronic journals· too.
In the electronic medium, one technicallycopies an item when one prints it out or
downloads it. When I put a printed journalthat I have bought on to a library shelf, I
do not copy it. Thus technically doing·
anything at all with an electronic journal,even when you have subscribed to it,
entails copying it and is therefore restrictedby copyright law; unless your agreementwith the publisher says you can dosomething, you can't. Unless publishers
are reasonable about allowing libraries (orsomebody!) to retain copies of theirjournals indefinitely, there is a danger thatelectronic-only journals might disappear
altogether. There is no financial incentive,
no business reason, why the publisher
should retain material that will generate no
more revenue.
So why are somepublishers trying to stop other bodies fromkeeping their material for the long term?
As yet this is not a major problem because
electronic-only journals, not printed at all,are in a small minority and all the major
journals still appear in print. But thatsituation will not last much longer. Somepublishers issue a retrospective CD-ROM
at the end of the year, or even a
retrospective printed volume, as part of alibrary subscription to their electronic-onlyjournals ~- these seem to me to be farsighted measures. The issue of how topreserve journals whose publishers are notso far-sighted is unresolved. Personally I
would support an extension of legal
deposit to electronic publications, so thatthe British Library and equivalent legal
deposit libraries in other countries are
permitted to download and retain a copy of
every electronic publication, to ensure its
permanent preservation.

Even if the research support role of thelibrary becomes wholly or almost wholly
electronic, it is unlikely that the teachingsupport role will. Thus universities willcontinue to have libraries, and some -albeit a declining proportion -- of theinformation resources within them will bein print. It makes sense for one focus toprovide access to all information resources
regardless of medium.
It would be
uneconomic and inefficient for every
department or faculty to try to organise
access to electronic information resources
separately -- not least because several
departments might subscribe to the same
title while another of minority interest to
several departments was purchased bynone of them.
Another issue that has seen much debate
lately has· been the archiving andpreservation of electronic journals. If I
buy an annual subscription to a printed
journal, and then cancel the subscription, I
keep the issues for that year: the physicaljournals are my property, though theircontent is not my intellectual property and
I am constrained by the law as to howmuch copying I can allow. But I could
lend the issues that I had bought tosomeone else, sell them second-hand, givethem away or bequeath them. If I buy a
year's subscription to an online journal andthen don't renew it, on the other hand, I
have nothing for my money. At the end of
the year my access is withdrawn.
Publishers have never provided archival
access to their publications; once they areout of print and no copies are left in theSo, speaking as an academic who is not alibrarian, I affirm that we will need59

1997) and its successor the National
Electronic Site Licence Initiative, NESLI(Friedgood, 1998). The implicit
assumption behind these activities of theYK Higher Education Funding Councils(and presumably therefore also theassumption of the UK Government) is thatthe commercial nexus is here to stay in thescholarly journals field. I am bound tosay that I find this disappointing. I had
hoped that the higher education institutions
collectively -- might have been able toagree on some collective action to fightoverpricing. We could have organised amonopsony - that is, a situation where
there is only one customer! But the naturalcompetitive tendencies of universities
seems to have militated against this, andthe publishers, despite all the complaints,
are clearly still confident that they cancontinue to compensate for lost
subscriptions by raising prices to theirremaining customers by figures well above
inflation. I still think they will fall off thecliff one day, but the lack of will toorganise an alternative has postponed thatday into the 21st century.

libraries and librarians in the brave newelectronic future!
The future of the scholarly journal
If I had been delivering this paper a coupleof years ago, I would have said that thecommercial publishers of academic
journals were likely to find themselves indifficulties -- of their own making, owing
to their refusal to reconsider theirexcessive pricing. I believed that thevarious initiatives being taken byacademics, university librarians anduniversity administrations to bring into
being an alternative non-commercial
electronic publication system might bear
fruit. The driving force, of course, was thedesperate shortage of funds for academic
libraries, but the well-publicised profit
figures of the Reed Elsevier group fromthe Elsevier Science division, and the very
high price increases imposed by certain
smaller commercial publishers, also
contributed to the feeling that thecommercial publishers were heading
towards the edge of a cliff.

Clearly, no-one can go on raising prices
indefinitely when their chief market has
declining purchasing power. Charging"what the market will bear" is fair enoughin a market economy, but charging beyond
what the market will bear is foolish in thelong run, ~ven if profitable in the short run.
Publishers have, of course, incurredconsiderable investment costs in tooling up
for electronic publishing, and quite rightly
point out that during the era of dual
publishing they still incur the direct costsof print publication: paper, printing anddistribution bills. If and when publication
becomes purely electronic these costs willcease -- at least for the publisher, thoughof course paper and laser-printing have tobe paid for by the end-user of electronic
publications, if they
articles out.
Meanwhile publishers
a case that

Now I am not so sure. Although new noncommercial electronic journals continue toappear, many of them have only start-up
funding and they are all having to looktowards cost-recovery business plans.. In
our own field Ariadne is a successful ejournal -- my paper last year (Rowland,1997) in that journal has generated morecomments back to me than anything else
I've ever written, suggesting that people
actually read Ariadne! But with the end of
their funding they will have to start
charging.
Meanwhile the mainstream scholarly
publishers, both for-profit and not-forprofit, have been very active. For higher
education libraries at least, he most notable
activity has been, of course, the Pilot Site
Licence Initiative (PSLI Evaluation Team,60

heir costs have actually risen. In trying torecoup from their existing, paper journal,
customer base the costs of developing theelectronic alternative -- rather than bytaking the investment funds out of their
existing profits -- they risk destabilising
the entire scholarly publishing chain.

So where does all this leave the scholarly
journal in the academic library? In a stateof flux, I suppose! The free electronic
journals will grow slowly in number andsize, but will have to start charging at leastmodest prices to cover their production
costs. Overt or covert subsidy will not lastfor ever, unless here really is afundamental redesign of the scholarly
communication system. This would haveto be led by the academics themselves,
though either their universities or theirlearned societies, and present evidence isthat it is rather unlikely.

There is another reason why I am less
optimistic about thee-journal future than I
was a couple of years ago. Many
university libraries are now making asubstantial number of electronic journals
available to staff and students via campus
networks, as noted earlier. Do any of you
have an evidence that anyone is usingthem?
A graduate student of mine isdoing her dissertation about e-journal use
in the six universities in our region ofEngland, and while she has had success inholding extensive interviews with helpful
library staff at all six universities, herattempts to find a population of users of ej ournals to interview among the academics
have been an almost complete failure,despite extensive appeals.
And
Loughborough, at least, has been among
the vanguard of universities nationally inencouraging use of electronic information
resources by staff and students.
Publishers, and librarians, need to haveregard to the needs and wishes of the realend-customer, the academic reader, as wellas the views of the purchaser, theuniversity library. I heard recently abouta Scandinavian university where thelibrarian has decided to transfer all
significant support resources for journals
to the electronic version; where publishers
insist on bundled subscriptions and are
therefore still sending printed issues, theseare placed on the shelf but nothing is donewith them. This is a brave approach, but I
do wonder what the academics andstudents at that university really think
about the policy.

The major publishers will continue tomove down the road towards dual
publishing until all existing scholarly
journals are available in both forms. Theircontent will start to diverge, as presagedby the SuperJournal project in the UK -with multimedia content, hypertext links
and supplementary data included in theelectronic version. A variety of pricing
options will be created by publishers,
including involvement in licensing
schemes like NESLI, annual subscriptions
to al l of a publisher's output, annual
subscriptions to individual titles, and payper-drink. The last-named is unlikely toappeal to libraries, but its importance isthat it just might produce a new source ofrevenue for publishers. The real answer tothe journals pricing crisis is for some of
the first-copy cost of journals to be paid
for from somewhere other than academic
libraries' acquisitions budgets.
If
purchases of individual articles -- currently
handled through document delivery
companies -- moves in the electronic era
back towards the publishers themselves,
they may start to get revenue fromdepartmental or even personal pockets inaddition to that derived from the library.
Another issue for libraries is the divisionof their acquisitions budgets between
different types of product. For years there61have been complaints, especially fromacademics in the humanities, that the rising
prices of journals, especially in thesciences, have led to libraries cutting theirbook purchases to afford the essential
journals, and as I am sure you all know
many libraries have responded to thiscriticism by trying to redress the balance.
There is also the issue of the balance
between the library as a research resource,
mainly provided by journals, and thelibrary as a teaching resource, substantiallyprovided by books and often in multiple
copies. This balanc~ will vary fromuniversity to university depending on the
research-intensiveness of the institution,but every university does have to teach.
Many lecturer's reading lists today will
include WWW sites, and these have theadvantage that students will not find that
all the copies are out on loan.
Manylecturers also specify particular journal
articles, too, which has led to expP-rimentson the question of the electronic equivalent
to short-loan journal article photocopy
collections. One of these experiments at
Loughborough, ACORN, was very
successful and has demonstrated a possible
way forward for this area of library support
to teaching (Woodward et al., 1998a). But
all the indications are that the bulk oflecturers' reading lists will continue to bebooks, essentially textbooks. This maychange slowly as more computer-assisted
flexible learning comes into use inuniversities -- another interesting topic thatis perhaps slightly outside the scope oftoday's talk. My point now is that thepressure on library budgets from theteaching and learning function, as
contrasted to the research function, of theuniversity, will continue to be strong.

databases on CD-ROMs, and now some ofthese are being mounted on hard disks
within the institution (after delivery on
CD-ROM) to overcome the technicalproblems of CD-ROM networking. As
primary publications become available inelectronic form, there are on the one handbudgetary pressures as between the two
types of electronic resources, and pressuresfrom users that the two should be linked.
Thus one would like to be able to conduct
a search in Chemical Abstracts databases,
say, and then link seamlessly into the fulltexts of the articles retrieved.
The
technical, financial and contractual
problems for the library, however, inmaking such a user-friendly service
available are not trivial.
Every suchenhancement of service is expensive, notjust in terms of the subscriptions to the
products, but also in terms of the highcalibre administrative and technicalsupport staff time needed within thelibrary.
Some of the secondary database providers
are, of course, the same firms that publish
primary journals. Thus Elsevier now owns
not only Excerpta Medica, theirs for sometime now, but more recently Engineering
Index too.
The American Chemical
Society owns not only Chemical Abstracts
but also an impressive stable of chemical
primary journals of high repute. But thisdoes not ·solve the problem of seamlesslinking: any secondary database, in order
to be comprehensive, will have to cover
the primary journals of many publishers
including many very small not-for-profit
ones. So the users' need for hypertext
linking across the World Wide Web
between the products of many competing
publishing companies will remain, and thisis one that is going to be hard to solve
technically, financially and even legally(given the restrictions that exist in many
jurisdictions on collaboration between
competitors).

Finally there is competition between
electronic products, as between primaryand secondary materials in electronic form.
For years libraries have been buying
relatively expensive abstracts and indexes62mean (without in any way endorsing that
one over its rivals!). I.would like to see allof the publishers allowing all of theirelectronic journals to be accessed via all ofthese services, so that the end-customer,
the university library, could make its own
choice as to which of these "one-stop
shops" they would subscribe to, just as
they do now with subscription agents.
Alas, however, you cannot do that. Every"one-stop shop" has signed up a different
subset of the publishers, and the largest
academic publisher of them all, the Reed
Elsevier group, refuses to go into any ofthem because they have established theirown, ScienceDirect, to which they are also
trying to attract other smaller publishers.

In an ideal world, the user, a university
staff member, would be able to use a
WWW browser on their own desk -- at theuniversity or in their study at home -- toaccess their university's information
resource (the thing we might oldfashionedly call a library). They could
then, in a straightforward way without
needing any degree of IT skill beyond thatwhich is now commonplace among
educated people, navigate through thevarious resources, primary and secondary,
to which their institution subscribed or
which are available free of charge, find theones that they need, and, if they wished,print them out. (You cannot of course,
print out multimedia features, but they
could be downloaded to the users' own
hard disk.)

The NESLI project (Friedgood, 1998)
clearly aims to help with this problem, atleast so far as UK higher education
institutions are concerned. If publishers
can be persuaded to enter the scheme, themanaging agent, Swets and Zeitlinger, will
fulfil the "middleman" role that
subscription agents filled in the print era,relieving the libraries of the administrative
burden of dealing with each publisher
individually. The Manchester Computer
Centre will similarly relieve them of thetechnical work of ensuring good reliable
links to all the publishers' sites, andprovide cross-publisher searching, andlinking between publishers and tosecondary databases. No university iscompelled to take part; they can still deal
with publishers direct if they wish. No
publisher is compelled to take part either,and if they do take part they can negotiate
variations from the standard contract. It is
not yet known what pricing deals Swets
will be able to negotiate with publishers,
but the more universities come into thescheme, the stronger the bargaining power
Swets will have.

If the user is a student, you will need toprovide the same service from open-accessPC labs throughout the campus, as well asfrom network points in rooms in halls ofresidence, and, by using the public
telecomms network, from students' homes
or lodgings in the town as well. The
University of Wolverhampton has afascinating project here, in co-operation
with their local cable TV company toprovide access to the university's systemfrom any building in the town, for users
with the appropriate authorisation.
The difficulties in a library providing thissort of service are currently immense, andmost stem from the competitive behaviourof academic publishers. Thus, in the printera, every publisher was willing to sell all
their journals through subscription agentsin what I think we can agree was aconvenient and efficient system. Now,
however, the different subscription agentsand some other organisations are offering
rival electronic journal delivery services -one can instance Blackwell's Electronic
Journal Navigator as an example of what I

I am sorry that I cannot give a clearer
picture of where things are going. All I
63

can offer you, in Churchillian terms, isplenty of blood, toil, sweat and tears, as
you try to deal with this technically,legally and financially complicatedsituation on behalf of your users, out ofyour shrinking budgets, and often withdeclining numbers of those very staff thatare needed to cope with it!

Initiative: A progress report.
10(1), 17-20.

Serials,

Ravetz, J.R. (1973) Scientific Knowledge
and its Social Problems. Harmondsworth,
UK: Penguin Books
Rowland, F. (1997) Print journals: Fit for
the future? Ariadne, 7, 6-7; longer version
at http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue7 /fytton/

REFERENCES
Friedgood, B. (1998) The UK National
Site Licensing Initiative (NESLI). Serials,
11(1), 37-39

Rowland, F., McKnight, C., Meadows, J.
and Such, P. (1996) ELVYN: The deliveryof an electronic version of a journal fromthe publisher to libraries. Journal of theAmerican Society for Information Science,47(9), 690-700.

Ginsparg, P. (1994) First steps towards
electronic research communication.
Computers in Physics, 8(4), 390-396, andhttp:://xxx.lanl.gov/blurb/

Senders, J.W. (1977) An online scientificjournal. Information Scientist, 11(1), 3-9.

Hamad, S. (1996) Implementing peer
review on the net: Scientific quality
control in scholarly electronic journals, in
Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic
Frontier (Peek, R.P. and Newby, G.B.,
eds). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, pp.
103-118

Shackel, B. (1991) BLEND-9: Overview
and Appraisal. British Library Research
Paper 82. London: The British Library.
Tuck, B., McKnight, C., Hayet, M. andArcher, D. (1990) Project Quartet. LIR
Report 76. London: The British Library.

McKnight, C. (1994) Network scholarly
publishing: retrospect and prospect. In
Internet World and Document Delivery
International 94. London: Mecklennedia,
pp. 86-92.

Woodward, H., Gadd, E., Kingston, P.,
Goodman, R. and Muir, A. (1998a)
Project ACORN (Access to Course
Readings via Networks) Final Report.
Loughborough, UK: Pilkington Library,
Loughborough University.

Meadows, A.J. (ed.) (1980) Developmentof Science Publishing in Europe.
Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Woodward, H., Rowland, F., McKnight,
C., Pritchett, C. and Meadows, J. (1998b)
Cafe Jus: An electronic journal user study.
Journal of Digital Information, 1(3),http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v01/i03/Woodward/

Meadows, J., Rowland, F. and YatesMercer, P. (1997) An online electronic
journal for teaching purposes. ALT-J, theAssociation for Learning Technology
Journal, 5(1), 13-18.

Ziman, J.M. (1968) Public Knowledge:
The Social Dimension of Science.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
P
r
e
s
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Pilot Site Licence Initiative Evaluation
Team (1997) The UK Pilot Site Licence64

Retrieval System for the Microfilm Image Databasesin the Media Center, Osaka City University
NAGATA Yoshikatsu, SHIBAYAMA Mamoru, KITA Katsuichi, MAEDA Harumi
Media Center, Osaka City University
3-3-138, Sugimoto, Sumiyoshi, Osaka 558-8585, JAPAN
Email: {nagata, sibayama, kita, harumi}@media.osaka-cu.ac.jp
Fax: +81-6-690-2736 (+81-6-6690-2736 from Jan. 1999)
URL address: http://www.media.osaka-cu.ac.jp/indexe.html
Although historical materials should be freely
available to researchers, access to rarematerials is usually strictly limited toqualified and authorized researchers in orderto minimize the risk of damage. For wider
access, original materials are usually copied
onto microfilm.

Abstract
Historical materials and other important
documents are often recorded and stored on
microfilm. Despite the importance of suchprimary materials in historical studies,
however, their accessibility is limited by theneed for the user to handle the microfilm inperson.

Even so, researchers who want to access thesematerials need to handle a microfilm reader inperson.
And remote users have further
inconvenience in browsing the microfilm.
Also, from the viewpoint of library routines,
personnel are required to manage the lending
service of microfilm cartridges.

To increase the accessibility of microfilm
resources, a retrieval system for microfilm
image databases has been implemented in theMedia Center, Osaka City University. The
basic concept of this retrieval system is toprovide a user-friendly interface that is
platform-independent.

The Media Center, Osaka City University,
holds several rare collections, and numerous
selected items are duplicated on microfilm.
To facilitate and increase the use of thesemicrofilm resources, a retrieval system for theimage databases of microfilm (Microfilm
image Information Retrieval System, MIRS)
has been implemented. This keyword-based
image retrieval system has been developed ona workstation using a WWW server andseveral CGI programs to facilitate access tothe catalog database. This system provides
the same accessibility to users from both
inside and outside the university.

Although the system includes mechanicaldevices, no serious trouble has occurred since
we started operation two years ago.
In this paper, we introduce the concept andimplementation of this retrieval system andrelated facilities in the Media Center.

1 Introduction
Primary materials are of prime importance tohistorical studies. A given text may exist in
severalversionsorwithvariousinterpretations, and each material should betreated as a unique object of study.

In recent months, the monthly access hasreached 600 hits to the server.

65Each floor is about 2,800 square meters inarea. : Holdings number 2 million books,
6,000 periodical titles and 15,000 multimedia
titles. This zone is equipped with several
network access terminals to facilitate theretrieval of library information and provide
access to the electronic library services
mentioned in a later section.

2 Media Center
Following its establishment in the first quarterof this century, the OCU library gained
nationwide recognition as a premier libraryfacility. However, in recent years, it founditself unable to keep pace with theinformation revolution and thus to meetcontemporary demand.
The urgent needarose to modernize the facilities in order topromote educational and research activities at
the university. Against this background, it
was decided to integrate the library, computer
facility and education in information
processing in order to provide the students
and researchers access to the modem tools of
the information age. As a result, in October
1996, the Osaka City University Media
Center was founded with the aim of providing
a high technology academic and research
environment that is focused on the present
and coming information age.

2.1.2 Information Processing Zone

The information processing zone consists of aparallel server, high-speed graphics and image
processing servers and other computing
facilities. This zone also functions as anucleus of the campus network and provides
global Internet access to students andresearchers.
2.1.3 Multimedia Zone

The multimedia zone provides facilities forusing the wide variety of multimedia productsthat form part of library collection. In
addition, the training room for information
processing allows students freely to use
computer facilities for their academic work.
There is also a language laboratory withmultimedia equipments.

In addition to librarians and administrative
staff, the Media Center also has a dozen
research staff from four broad areas of
specialization,
namely,Database andMultimedia Systems, Computing Systems,
Network Systems, and Library andInformation Science. In addition to researchin their respective areas of specialization; theyalso conduct lectures and training sessions
and support the management of the Center's
information infrastructure.

2.2 Electronic Library Services
The following electronic library services areaccessible through the Internet.
2.2.1 OPAC

Like university libraries, we also provide an
OPAC service. Recently access has reachedabout one hundred thousand hits per month.

2.1 Facilities by Zone
2. 1. 1 Library Zohe

The library zone occupies eight of the thirteen
floors of the Media Center. There are twofloors for deposit, one for periodicals, one forreference, two for open-shelves and reading,
one for open-shelves and reading for
researchers only, and one for rare books.

2.2.2 Secondary Information Database

Library information is also available on CDROM and is accessible from the campus
LAN.
2.2.3 Corpus Database66

Figure 2. The automatic cartridge storage

Figure 1. Exterior view of the MIRS

2.2.5 Great
Hanshin
Database

We provide two kinds of corpus database.
One is a database of the whole texts ofjournals published by institutes or faculties in
the university. The other is a database of
selected rare books.

Earthquake

Almost three and half years ago, the great
Hanshin-Awaji earthquake killed more than
6,000 people in the Kobe and Hanshin area
and caused widespread and severe
infrastructural damage. Osaka also sufferedconsiderably.
Osaka City University
organized an academic research team thatsurveyed and recorded the damage from theviewpoint of geology. The Great Hanshin
Earthquake Database consists of images
recorded during the survey, aerial video
images, and geographical information on
Kobe. Images are linked to topographicalmaps on a web page.

2.2.4 MIRS
We also provide a service for image retrieval
from microfilm collections.
While thecorpus database system requires all images tobe stored in digital format in advance, themicrofilm image information retrieval system(MIRS) uses images that are stored in analog
format on microfilm. Further details are
given in a later section.

Client Machines

Automatic Cartridge Storage(PC, WS, etc.)(200 cartridges)

Reading Unit
Workstation(Sun Spare)Control

Scanning Unit

Digitized\ Image
L...........................................................................................

Figure 3. Hardware diagram of the MIRS

67

WWW Browser
Subject Selection

AccessHTML Code: ................... ,,,u,,, ............................................................ -............ ,u,.. , .................... .

i
~

,
'

HTTPD
Cataloging Object

CGI
RequestKeyword(I)

Catalogi:~ ,- -C-a-rt-ri-dg_e_D_a-ta-b-as-e-,r------------- .
.----.L.-J..----,

I
I

:
I
I

I
I

Query Engine_____...___

I--------

I
I
I
I
I

I

:
I
I
I

:

~Numbers

Image

L----,,------' :

I

I
I
I
I
I

Heading Index:;5r···

HardwareControllligiti,ing

Image

I

:, _________________
Cataloging Object ,,WWW Server.......................... _,•••·····•··•............................................................

___

Figure 5. Retrieval protocol

upon request can provide various kinds ofpreliminary
processing,suchasenlargement, rotation, and enhancement.

Figure 4. Software diagram of the MIRS

3 MIRS
The MIRS is a system of image retrieval frommicrofilms as mentioned briefly above. The
main concepts of this system are as follows.

(3) Friendly user-interface:
Since users are neither specialists nor
professionals in computer science, theuser interface of the query system and the
database construction must be easy tohandle.

(1) Combining catalog information andimages:Catalog information on images is input
into a database. Keyword query to the
database allows specification of therelated frames on microfilms.

(4) Flexible extension capability:
Other large-scale media like CD-ROM or
Photo CD can be seamlessly incorporated
into the system. Microfilm should be
merely one of a variety of mass storage
media.

3.1 Concept(2) Long-term offering of microfilms:(5) Query functions independent of theplatform:
Various functions of query and thestructure of the database should be
independent of the specific computer

The huge volume of microfilms alreadyaccumulated is immediately placed inservice without prior conversion of themedium. Digital processing of an image68

:· <7"1'?0°1-!Jkh:~lli;~1'?t.:!l)(C:,· '¥'"'-'J-<~ll'J~J> ..

. . (2)en. lli;jj\jil(51ys\'-=<J."'-1'.·.•.
.. (3)£ 'c:'<J.-·i-'.•~·'""1.,,1:9·.·.·· .·· •• . ,,_,, . . .

~i,it~;h**·?~//)J:'j•· J:~•.;;;·• •:::li::::>C-:"1":-»:· ±"2-*;.:_;i:+Hji;;:..,... lM+. ::,;.;_::t:.:.;+c.:,l>..-[v....,i:ol]-.---• l!el!!Jt!!!, Otlllil) •(009'-00J·:it1t+#ff. . :..· ·.· ·.·.

~lillJJ :tit~ffi'Jl\iil:it~ii fkfB/lxJ=if~Yll#:+=Yl :tit~ti!Eiii:i:i:~ii 't:;)'l•:. [#Of]::. · · [11011. ...

:•..

ta:t:i!!liio:>-F000t,,oo2S,-QOZ6"' . . .... ·. . .·.. ·.. ·. . ....· . .

.· :::

w.~<C10t2>~1a:, ...:::iYffi':il'~i:Fv.-c.L.i*'t:,•. a1<iisvt:~:o-<w1,,.o:i·.· . ·: ::l'Cfl!l'~f?') ~?b'C<ti~b. {ij"=b~if-~ti£'t;;i,,1,;;, □ 71Jt,b(l)~~*li!fst.)l~~M£-e,·f:)i:iofjla)~i\lltil~-z:r-.

Figure 7. Page for keyword query3.3 Software
To realize the concepts of the system, a
WWW server is used. The client user canaccess the server through a WWW browser.
Figure 6. Menu page for selecting subject

The software components of the server consistof CGI (Common Gateway Interface)programs. One component is for querying
the cataloging object, and . another is forcontrolling the digitizing hardware (Figure 4).

machine or operating system (OS).

3.2 Hardware
This system is characterized by the
combination of a WWW server and a
voluminous microfilm database. Its main
components are (1) automatic cartridgestorage for 16-mm microfilm; (2) an image
printer which converts the optical analog
image of microfilm into a digitized image;and (3) a WWW server workstation which
controls the components above and distributes
the image to the client (Figure 3). The
maximum capacity of the MIRS is 200
cartridges or I million images.

The retrieval protocol is shown in Figure 5.
The user first selects the subject of thematerial (Figure 6).
Then a page for
keyword query is sent to the browser (Figure7). After one or more keywords have been
input, a catalog output relating to the
keywords is transmitted (Figure 8). This
catalog shows the headings, physical frame
numbers underlined, and cartridge numbers.
To proceed, the user should specify the frame
number to retrieve. After a minuteor so ' the.
digitized image will be transmitted to theclient through the Internet (Figure 9).

69

4 Epilog
The MIR.S, which digitizes an image on
microfilm upon request, relies onmechanical equipment. this equipment
and the microfilm constitute the potentiallyweak points of the system. However, thesystem has been working without serious
trouble since it came into service almost
two years ago.

* ((~y::1$)} T=t-::Z. f--~~::,, ::Z. Tb [V1. 01] ** jj:~gfi [ J *(00047)'f-3r)::,J-r):::ir):,,1'J'.'.7:,,'' 1,)tll~~"/&' □ t~;[#04)=\=- 3 :tJ .J .J 'f- .J "J ::,,-' 1*00197* MC002«))

cooo65J::,, 3 -it·· o/ =1=-, "~ttgc;[#04)*00927*{( )) :,, 3 -it•' o/ =\=-, ]tif.ll+MC002(ocmo)

tJ :.,,*" 'J 1J 1 r) .I.-11:: :tJ :.,,, 1l1~t9Jl-gM~;(< )> =\=- 3 'J*'J* :.,,j .:i. 'J[#03]"01212*

We have been developing some advanced
ideas to increase the reliability andaccessibility.
These are (1) automatic
digitalization of consecutive scenes (2) CDROM as a mass storage medium and (3) adatabase query engine.

MC002

At present, the images retrieved from the
MIR.S are monochrome, but ideally imagesof historical materials should be colored.
More technical innovations in the network
will hopefully solve this point.

Figure 8. Catalog output

3.4 Services

Two collections are presently in service.
References
One is a part of the Fushimiya Documents, a
Shibayama, M., Namiki, M. 1996. Anlarge quantity of manuscripts of economic
implementationof a retrieval system for thetransactions in the Edo period, from the 17th
microfilm image databases through the World
century to the 19th century. About 4,000
Wide Web (in Japanese). IPSJ SIG Notes, 96
scenes selected from the Documents are(110), pp. 37 - 42.
stored in one microfilm cartridge. The otheris the Mori Collection which
includes biographies, history,
literature, and topography ofTable 1. Quarterly access record of the MIRSJapanese in the Edo period.
About 300,000 scenes are
PeriodFushimiya Documents
Mori Collection
stored in 94 cartridges.
Oct - Dec 1996
2535 (868)(not in service)
Table 1 shows the quarterly
Jan-Mar 1997
503 (336)
878 (407)
access records.
Apr - Jun 1997

At present, the third collection,a collection of Ryukyu
Material, is about to beimported.

Oct - Dec 1997

626 (304)
549 (403)
482 (340)

Jan - Mar 1998
Apr - Jun 1998

437
429

Jul - Sep 1997

709

(454)

898 (497)
619 (521)(Unit: Page)
Note: Numbers in parentheses are accesses from outside of theuniversity.

70

(340)

1050 (338)478 (267)(250)

~t ~;.

:'-' 'l: -- ""
k;_,,,.

".&•

11 .

•

.

• . !• ~.

'Figure 9. Retrieved image from the Fushimiya Documents

Shibayama, M. 1997. Kobunsho gazo
detabesu [Image database of historicalmaterials] (in Japanese). Jinmongaku to
Johoshori, 15, pp. 45 - 50.

71

The Dublin Core Data Model
Eric Miller and Stuart Weibel
OCLC Office of Research, USA
Email :[emiller,weibel]@oclc.org

Abstract

The co-evolution of the semantic framework of the Dublin Core,
together with the syntactic and structural facilities provided by XML and RDF,
has reached the point where a new generation of Weh-based resource
description is possible. The additional functionality of these technologies over
HTML-based metadata will support new services and opportunities that should
enhance thestate of resource description for electronic resources and improve
prospects for cross discipline and international interoperability.

72

Cataloging for the Web: Dublin Core and the Resource
Description Framework
Thomas Baker
Asian Institute of Technology
Thomas.Baker@cs.ait.ac.th

Abstract

Since the rise of the World Wide Web in 1994, libraries and information providers
share an Internet Commons. As in a linguistically complex land, the content providers
there use a wide variety of incompatible formats and cataloging rules to describe theirinformation. But likewise since 1994, there has been a growing initiative on the partof national libraries, government agencies, publishers, and universities to develop adeliberately simple "pidgin" set of metadata (cataloging) elements that is interoperablewith these various systems. This has resulted in the Dublin Core -- a set of fifteen
basic
categories with well-understood meanings like "Author" and "Title". This
two-page standard has already been translated into nine languages. In parallel with the
Dublin __ Core __ effort~_the. __World~Wide___ Web .community.,.. together. __with __ software__ _companies such as Netscape and Microsoft, has developed the Resource Description
Framework (RDF) -- a standard format for encoding the metadata of Web documents,
library catalogs, and electronic commerce applications. RDF uses XML, thesimplified SGML that is positioned to replace HTML and word-processing formats as
the standard format for documents on
the Web. Together, the Dublin Core and
RDF could provide a metadata system that is consistent across a wide range ofapplications and domains, no more complex than it needs to be, usable by bothexperts and non-experts, interoperable with existing library catalogs and legacy
databases, and coherent across many languages. This tutorial will provide an
introduction to the issues, tools, and prospects.

73Introduction to DC-based Union Cataloging Systems for
Academic Journals in Digital Library Environments
Han Suk Choi
Korea Research Information Center

Abstract
As rapidly growing digital library and Web-based information technology, it is notdifficult for researchers to access online electronic collections over the world-wide publishers
and information providers. However, the cost for online academic journals is so expensive andvarying that most individual researchers can not afford to subscribe all of them. Korea
Research Information Center(KRIC) established for providing the most up-to-date academic
research information through union cataloging service, oversea online journal service, andspecialized information service. KRIC has developed Research Information Service
Systems(RISS) since 1997. One of the interesting RISS service is Dublin Core(DC)-based
union cataloging systems for academic journals. We have designed and currently implemented
the DC-based union cataloging systems for academic journals. In this presentation, we
introduce the system architecture and design details of the DC-based union cataloging systems
for academic journals. The major subsystems of DC-based union cataloging systems are serverside union catalogue management system, online shared cataloging service system using
Z39.50 standard IR protocol, and copy-fax service system. The proposed DC-based union
cataloging systems will share with most university libraries in Korea. Each local librarygenerates bibliographic records of academic journals which they have, and then register the
metadata of the academic journal records into the union catalog database in KRIC, which isgeographically distributed from the local libraries. The major contents of this presentation are
as follows;
1. Introduction
2. Metadata Elements for DC-based Union Cataloging Systems
3. DC-based Union Cataloging Systems for Academic Journals
System Architecture
DC-based Union Cataloging Management System
Online Shared Cataloging Service System
Copy-Fax Service System
4. Discussion
5. Conclusion

74Extension of MHTML to Text Input and Text Search
Functions in Multiple Languages on Off-the-shelf
Browsers
Shigeo Sugimoto, Shigetaka Nakao, Myriam Dartois, Jun Ohta,
Akira Maeda*, Tetsuo Sakaguchi, Koichi Tabata
University of Library and Information Science
Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan{sugimoto, nakao, myriam, jun, saka, tabata}@ulis.ac.jp*Nara Institute of Science and Technology
Ikoma, Nara, Japanaki-mae©is.aist-nara.ac.jp

Abstractfrom any off-the-shelf browser. In addition
to the extended MHTML technology, thispaper shows an SGML-based full-text retrieval system which is developed using theextended MHTML. It has a user interface
to input queries and to display results in
multiple languages.

The World Wide Web (WWW) covers allover the world. However, browsing function for documents in multiple languages
is not widely available yet for casual users.
From the viewpoint of digital libraries, functions to display and input multilingual texts
are obviously crucial. Multilingual HTML(MHTML) is a browser technology for multilingual documents on WWW. The authors
developed a display function of multilingual
documents based on the MHTML technology. This technology was intended as a simple, light, easy-to-use and inexpensive technology to view multilingual documents via
the Internet. The authors have extended
it to text input function in multiple languages on off-the-shelf browsers. The newtechnology gained by this extension is quite
useful to create an environment for endusers of digital libraries where they are able
to view and search multilingual documents

Keywords
Multilingual Document Browsing, Off-theShelf WWW Browsers, Multilingual Texts
Display and Input, Text Retrieval in Multiple Scripts

1

Introduction

The Internet and the World Wide Web(WWW) are very important infrastructure
for digital libraries. English is widely accepted as a common language on WWW
for global communication, but on the other75

2

hand, there are a huge amount of documents written in non-English languages on
WWW. It is obvious that functions to access information in foreign languages as wellas English are crucial for WWW ~nd digital libraries. From another viewpoint, sincelibraries are inherently multilingual, library
information systems have to cope with multilingual library information. In the case oflibrary information systems handling Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) texts,
display and input functions for a large setof characters containing non-standardized
characters is one of the key technologies tobuild a digital library.

Display and Input of
Texts in Multiple Languages

A display function of HTML documents anda text input function on a client are themost basic functions required to access information on WWW. However, these functions for texts in foreign languages are notalways provided on a client. The MHTML
project had initi~lly started to realize alight, easy-to-use and ubiquitous environment to browse WWW documents written in multiple languages on an off-the-shelf
WWW browser. We developed a viewing
function to display multilingual documents
on a client where fonts for multilingual texts
are not necessarily installed. Key aspectof MHTML was that, even if a standard
character code set for multilingual texts is
widely accepted it is not practical to assume
that end users of digital libraries can afford
a complete set of fonts for the code set.
Text input function is crucial as well as
the display function for browsing documents
in multiple languages. The text input function is generally defined as a mapping toa character code or a code string from auser action on an input device, i.e., a single keystroke, a combination of keystrokes,
a sequence of keystrokes, a mouse click, andso on. Since inputted texts are usually displayed on a screen, the text input function requires a display function as well. In
the case of an ordinary Japanese text input function, for example, a Japanese wordor phrase expressed in phonetic characters(Hiragana, Katakana or alphabets) is converted to an appropriate Japanese wordor phrase expressed in Kanji, Hiragana,
Katakana and/or alphabets. The character code string emitted from the function
is displayed on a screen using font locallyinstalled. The phonetic expression in al-

The authors have been working on abrowser technology named Multilingual
HTML (MHTML) to display multilingual documents on an off-the-shelf WWW
browser even if the browser has no fonts
required to display the documents[4][5][7].
Since a document browsing function is realized as a Java applet, users are required tohave only an off-the-shelf browser which iscapable to run Java applets, i.e., a browser
applet running on a browser. We have applied the MHTML technology to a gateway
service to view foreign documents and toa multilingual electronic text collection offolktales[2][3]. We have extended MHTML
to realize a text input function in multiple languages.
We have implemented
a Japanese text input server which sends
a user interface applet to input Japanesewords/ characters from a remote client without any Japanese functions. Since the extended MHTML technology is designed independently of languages, it is extensible
to other languages. We have also applied
the extended MHTML to an SGML-based
text retrieval system, which is a full-text
database for documents written in multiple languages and has a user interface built
based on the MHTML technology.

76phabets, i.e., transliteration, can be used
to input texts from a conventional ASCII
keyboard. The mapping function can be located in the client or in a server connected
via a network, but the font has to be locallyprovided. In addition, users have to set up
their local environments in accordance withthe requirement to input texts such as connection to the mapping function and fontinstallation. It is difficult for an end user
who casually accesses foreign documents to
set up his/her environment.

3

MHTML

3.1

Basic Concepts

in Japanese. A Gaiji can be assigned acode and a glyph locally, but the code has
no meaning outside the local machine. An
MHTML server can display any character if
it is given its glyph and code. There are two
ways to make a Gaiji displayable on a client,(1) to add new glyphs to a font file in the
font bank, and (2) to add a new font file,which contains glyphs for a set of Gaijis, tothe font bank.

3.2

Extension of MHTML Text Input

Text search is a primary function for information access, i.e., text search in a
database and in a document displayed ona screen. Text input function in multiple
languages is indispensable to realize text
search function in multiple languages. Byslightly extending the MHTML technology,
we have gained a framework for text input
in multiple languages from an off-the-shelfbrowser. As illustrated in Figure 2, the extended MHTML object contains an identifier of character encoding and charactercodes in addition to the components of abasic MHTML object shown in Figure 1. A
source character code string can be reproduced from an extended MHTML object byreplacing every character in the internalized
text string by its corresponding source character code. The character encoding identifier is required to make the reconverted text
conformant with the ISO-2022-JP-2 standard. Conversion to Unicode[S] is also possible. Based on the framework, we have developed a Japanese text input function for
an off-the-shelf browser running on a client
which has no Japanese text environment.
Figure 3 shows an outline of a Japanese
text input server based on MHTML. The
Japanese input server has been implemented using a text input software called
W nn and a user interface applet defined

An MHTML server and an MHTML object are the key components of the MHTML
technology. The MHTML server fetches adocument from a document server, converts
it into an MHTML object and sends the object to a client with an applet to display theobject on the client. The MHTML object
contains the text string of the source document, and a minimum set of font glyphs
required to display the text. (The character
string in the object is internalized object by
object, so that it can not be re-converted tothe source character code string.) Since theapplet can display all of the characters contained in the source document using only
the glyphs sent from the server, the clientneed no font for foreign languages. Figure
1 shows an MTHML object. The repertoire of the languages of the server primarily depends on the set of fonts stored in the
font bank because conversion of documents
into ISO-2022-JP-2(6] standard is usuallystraightforward.
MHTML also has the advantage thatit can display a document which contains
a non-standard characters.
These nonstandard characters occasionally appear inJapanese texts and they are called Gaiji

77

Text
(Internal code string)

Font

HeaderI[i]I ···
#23

#1

#41

t
Visualized text

Figure 1: MHTML object

HeaderCharacter code

Font

Text
(Internal code string)[i] ... ~ ... 3D71 . . 3F5E ... #41 #1
01

#1

I

01

#41
I

l

t

Corresponding character code
Character set ID

3F5E 3D71•••

Character code string

Figure 2: Extended MHTML object

78

• ••

based on the extended MHTML. The text
input server (TI server) is located betweena client and a WWW server. The TI
server receives a Japanese word written ina transliterated form and produces a list ofJapanese words. Figure 4 shows a user interlace ap-plet to input Japanese texts. This
text input applet has a text input field totype a Japanese word or phrase in transliterated form. The CONVERT button means
to send the inputted string to the Japanese
text input server. A list of words is returned
from the TI server and is displayed on theleft of the input field. A word selected bya mouse click on the list is displayed in
the top line. Users can append additional
words/ characters to form a complete wordor phrase for retrieval. The SUBMIT button means to send the character code string
displayed in the top line to a text searchfunction which uses the string for retrieval.
The Japanese texts displayed on the applet
are sent as an extended MHTML object.

4

configuration. It receives a text encoded ina regional standard and converts it into theISO-2022-JP-2 standard. The text is converted into a Unicode-based text to create
the index. And, on one hand, the text isstored as it is. ISO-2022-JP-2 standard has
multiple character code spaces for character sets of regional languages and defines
switching protocol between the spaces. Thisfeature is quite advantageous to use an existing document encoded in a regional standard in the internationalized environment.
However, this encoding scheme is disadvantageous to make a text retrieval function
simple. On the other hand, since the flat
character space given in Unicode is advantageous for a simple text retrieval function,
Unicode is employed as the basic encoding
scheme to build the index. The index is created based on N-gram. Its user interface iscreated using the extended MHTML. Thus,
this system provides a framework for retrieving texts encoded in multiple encoding
scheme (i.e., multilingual documents) withubiquitous user interface for retrieval.

An SGML-based Text
Retrieval System

5

We have experimentally developed an
SGML-based text retrieval system which isdesigned to receive texts encoded in multiple scripts. Currently, it can store and retrieve Japanese and ASCII texts, but it isextensible to texts scripted in any character codes. Its user interface is designed using MHTML in order to provide users withubiquitous accessibility to texts scripted in
multiple languages. Figure 5 shows the userinterface of the text retrieval system. The
window at the bottom is a text input window shown in figure 4. The window at the
top shows a list of hits gained by a retrieval.
A user can display a source text by clicking
on an element of the list.
Figure 6 shows the outline of the system

Conclusion

The technology implemented as MHTML isquite simple. The research of MHTML wasstarted to realize a simple, light, easy-to-use
and inexpensive environment to read andwrite foreign texts in the WWW environment. The functions implemented in the
research have proved the feasibility of suchenvironment. We believe that the framework realized in MHTML has potential tochange paradigm of text input and output
in a distributed environment.
The authors have applied the MHTML
technology to build user interfaces for anelectronic text collection, an OPAC and afull-text retrieval system. They are alsocollaborating with the internationalization

79

Client

ServerWWW
serverResult of
retrieval(HTML)

Initial page
(HTML) -MHTML
Server-

MHTML----------

Candidates forconversion(MHTML)-hConversion
Server I+ ~
(Wnn)

-

Text Input
Server---User's input(Roman-ji)

Result of conversion (Character code string)
Figure 3: Text Input Server

Figure 4: Text Input Applet

80

MHTML
class

Text Input
classFigure 5: User Interface of the SGML-based Text Retrieval System

81

MHTML Text

(ISO-2022-JP-2)

Original
Text,-----~-----1-1------t-(ISO-

Codes+Code(Searchrequest)MHTML
Viewer

Text
Input

FullText DB(Unicode)

Web Server

TI ServerGATEWAY

ascii
character

WWW Browser

Figure 6: Overview of an SGML-based Full-text Retrieval System for Multlingual Documents

group of Dublin Core[l] to apply MHTML
for multilingual user interface for a metadata database. These application systems
require rather simple text-based user interfaces but not fancy ones. To extend therepertoire of languages, MHTML requires
fonts. Fonts of public domain are required
to extend services for not-for-profit services.

tales as a set of encapsulated document objects: An approach for casual users to browse multi-lingual documents on the fly, Proceedings of
ECDL'97, pp.215-231, 1997[4] Maeda, A., et al.; Viewing Multilingual Documents on Your Local Web
Browser, CACM, vol.41, no.4, pp.6465, 1998

References[5] Maeda, A., et al.; A Multilingual
HTML Document Browsing System
for Clients without Multilingual Fonts,
Transactions of IPSJ, vol.39, no.3,
pp.802-809, 1998 (in Japanese)[1] Baker, T. and Weibel, S.; Dublin
Core in Thai and Japanese: Managing
Universal Metadata Semantics, Digital Libraries, no.11, pp.35-47, 1998 (inJapanese)[2] Dartois, M., et al.; A multilingual electronic collection of folk tales for casual
users using off-the-shelf browsers, D-lib
magazine, 1997,
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/
october97/sugimoto/10sugimoto.html[6] Ohta, M. and Honda, K.; ISO-2022-JP2; Multilingual Extension of IS0-2022JP, RFC 1554, 1993
[7] Sakaguchi, T., et al.; A Browsing Tollfor Multi-lingual Documents for Users
without Multi-lingual Fonts, Proceedings of DL'96, pp.63-71, 1996
(8) The Unicode Consortium; The Unicode Standard, Ver.2.0, AddisonWesley, 1996

[3] Dartois, M., et al.; Building a multilingual electronic text collection of folk82

Reasoning about RDF Elements
Vilas Wuwongse 1, Chutipom Anutariya 1 and Ekawit Nantajeewarawat2
Email: vw@cs.ait.ac.th, ca@cs.ait.ac.th and ekawit@siit.tu.ac.th
1Computer Science & Information Management Program

2 Department of Information Technology
Sirindhom International Institute of Technology
Thammasat University
Pathumtani 12120, Thailand

School of Advanced Technologies
Asian Institute of Technology
Pathumtani 12120, Thailand

Abstract
This paper proposes a theoretical framework for reasoning about RDF elements byemployment of t~e theory of Declarative Programs. With reasoning capability, rules
can be defined m order to explicitly and formally state semantic relationships
between RDF elements, which will enable inference or derivation of new RDF
elements from existing ones. Hence, in addition to computation by pattern matching,
the proposed framework can formulate and handle complicated computations with
RDF elements. Application of this framework to Web-based resource discovery
problems is presented with an example.

Keywords:

RDF elements, declarative programs, resource discovery problems.

1 Introduction

Relying on the concepts of metadata, the Resource
Description Framework (RDF) [5], a collaborative
design effort under the auspices of the W3C (World
Wide Web Consortium), has been developed, in orderto provide a unified framework for processing
metadata. RDF metadata can be adopted in a wide
range of application areas including resource
discovery, digital library and electronic commerce.

The recent expansion in the use of the Internet andthe World Wide Web as information distribution
media has made available huge resources in electronic
form, so that today's Web resembles a gigantic libraryof books, pictures, songs, movies, weather forecasts,
horoscopes, yellow pages, etc. The development of aneffective information retrieval technique has become
one of the major issues in view of the fact that almost
all presently available search engines merely employ
techniques which simply match words or sentences indocuments. Users are often annoyed at receiving
several thousands hits after just typing in a few
keywords. Moreover, these search results still do notpresent users with enough information to determine
their relevance, so that, in turn, in most cases further
exploration is required.

This paper attempts to develop a framework andtechnique for reasoning about RDF elements. With
this capability, one can define rules, which describe
semantic relationships between RDF elements, andwill be able to derive new RDF elements from existingones even though they have not previously explicitly
stated. In addition, application of the proposed
framework to resource discovery problems allows toincorporate reasoning or deductive capabilities into
the retrieval process.

A solution, proposed to date for coping with theselimitations on the Web, provides sufficientdescriptions, known as metadata. A search by meansof metadata is expected to be more efficient and moreaccurate, since users can precisely formulate more
specific queries which will yield more precise
answers. For example, a user may want to find any
items authored by John Smith, i.e., only items
authored by John Smith rather than all items
containing the words John Smith.

The proposed framework employs Declarative
Program (DP) Theory [1, 2, 3) - a generalization of
the conventional logic program theory, in which terms
are generalized into any data objects and substitutions
into specializations. In particular, it has been carefully
defined with generality and applicability to data
structures of any domains, each of which ischaracterized by a mathematical structure, called a
specialization system.

83Section 2 introduces the DP theory, Section 3
develops a specialization system for RDF elements
and RDF Declarative Programs, Section 4 presents anapplication of RDF Declarative Programs to Webbased Resource Discovery Problems with an example
and Section 5 draws conclusion.

For 0 e ..S: postfix notation allows to represent µ( 0)(a) as a 0. If b exists such that µ( 0)(a) = b, 0 is said tobe applicable to a, and a specialized to b by 0. A
specialization 0 e S is applicable to a subset B of A if

0 is applicable to any element of B; B 0 is then definedby B0 = {b0I beB}. Henceforth, any condition that
includes a0or B0 will also include the condition thatBis applicable to a or B.

2 Declarative Program Theory
Certain fundamental definitions of declarative
program theory [3] will be recalled.

Definition 2(Mappingyielding

Sets

of

all

Ground Objects)

2.1. Specialization Systems
A mapping rep: .A ➔ powerset( (}) is defined by

A specialization system is an abstract structure
derived from the generalization of substitutions in theconventional logic programs, and defined in terms ofcertain very simple axioms:

Definition lrep(a)= {g□2.2. Declarative Programs
Declarative programs and other related concepts
can now be defined in terms of a specialization system{Specialization System)

A specialization system is a four-tuple r = < _A,

I g=a0e(}, 0eS}.

r =<.A. q, ..s; µ >.

q,

S µ > of three sets _A, q, Sand a mapping µ from S

Definition 3

to the set of all partial mappings on _A, i.e., µ: S ➔parlial_map(.A), that satisfies the requirements:(Declarative Program)

Let X be a subset of _A A definite clause on X is aformula of the form:

1. \:/sb s2 E $ 3s E S: µ(s) = µ(s 1) 0 µ(si),2. 3s E S \:fa E .A: µ(s)(a) = a,
3. (le _A,

where H, B1, B2, ... , B0 are objects in X, often referred
to as atoms. H is called the head and (B1, B2, ... , B0 )the body of the definite clause. The set of all definite
clauses on X is denoted by Dclause(X). A declarative
program on X is a (possibly infinite) set of definite

where µ(s 1) 0 µ(s 2 ) is the composite mapping of thepartial mappings µ(s 1) and µ(s 2). The elements of _A, (}and S are called objects, ground objects, andclauses on X. A declarative program on .A is also
called a declarative program on r. D

specializations, respectively, the set (}the domain, andthe specializations, which satisfy the second
requirement, identity specializations. □A definite clause will often be called simply aclause. Let C be a definite clause. The head of C will
be denoted by head( C), and the set of all atoms in the
body of C by body( C). A clause C is called a unit
clause if body(C) is empty.

Intuitively, Conditions 1 to 3 mean that
1. for all specializations s1 and s2, there exists a
specialization s such that the corresponding
partial mapping of s is the composition of thetwo mappings corresponding to s1 and s2,

Let C be a definite clause O= (H ~ Bi, B2, ... , Bn),
When 0 E Sis applicable to H, B1, B2 , ... , B0 , a definite

2. there is a specialization that does not change
any objects, andclause C0= (H0 ~ B 1 0, B20, ... , B0 0) is obtained. A
definite clause C' is an instance of C iff there is a
specialization 0such that C'= C0. A definite clause C

3. ground objects are objects.

is a ground definite clause iff C E Dclause( (} ). A
ground instance of a clause C is a ground clause which
is an instance of C. Let P be a declarative program on84

r. Denote the set of all ground instances of definite
clauses in P by Gclause(P).

RDF term or a sequence of RDF terms. By
convention, an RDF term assumes one of the forms:

2.3. Semantics of Declarative Programs(a) empty form

The mapping Tp: 2(} ➔2(}, defined for a program P
on r, will be used to define the declarative semantics
of a program in Definition 5.

Definition 4(b) simple form

(Mapping Tp)

Let r = < .A, (}, ~ µ > and / c(c) nestedform

q.. A mapping Tp:

2q➔2qis defined byTp(/) = {head(C)where t is a tag type, the bi are all distinct attributenames, the ci are constants and the ai are groundRDF terms. In order to represent implicit information
contained in an RDF term, an RDF term used here
may carry variables. The formal definition of RDF
terms (with variables) will be given in the next subsection.

IC e Gclause(P), body (C) c I}.

D
By means of the mapping Tp, define declarative
semantics of a program P:

Definition 5(Declarative

Semantics

ofaProgram)Let P be a program on

Note that RDF terms of the empty form < t... bn="cn" /> can be equivalently
represented in the simple form <t b 1 ="c1 "bn="cn"> </ t>. In the sequel, all empty terms will
be written in the simple form.

r. The declarative

b1="c1"semantics of P, M(P), is defined by
00

M(P) = u[Tpt (0), _where 0 is the empty set.

n=l

3.2. Specialization System for RDF Terms

D

This sub-section defines a specialization system

3 RDF Declarative Programsfor RDF terms, r R = <./4, ~. ~. µR >, which will be
used in the definition of the specialization system for
RDF elements in Sub-section 3.3.

3.1. Basic Patterns of RDF Elements
In the RDF Model and Syntax Specification
proposed by the W3C, RDF elements are definedeither in Serialization or Abbreviated Syntax, both ofwhich are based on XML [4]. Serialization Syntax can
express the full capabilities of the RDF data model,
while Abbreviated Syntax includes additional
grammar, in order to provide a more compact form forrepresentation of a subset of the data model. Only
Serialization Syntax will be considered in this paper.

In the sequel, let T be a set of tag types, B attributenames (or qualifiers), C constants, TVAR tagvariables (or T-variables), BVAR attribute-variables(or B-variables), CVAR constant-variables (or Cvariables), and PVAR attribute-value-pair-variables(or P-variables). Assume that:
1. B contains an element CONTENT.
2. C contains E, which denotes the empty string or
white spaces.
3. No element in T begins with "TVAR:" and every
element in TVAR begins with "TVAR: ".
4. No element in B begins with "BVAR:" and every
element in BVAR begins with "BVAR: ".
5. No element in C begins with "CVAR:" and every
element in CVAR begins with "CVAR: ".
6. Every element in PVAR begins with "PVAR: ".

It is assumed here that the namespace name for the-RDF schema has been declared and abbreviated as
RDF. Examples of RDF tag names are RDF: RDF,
RDF:Description, RDF:Seq, RDF:Bag and
RDF:Alt.

RDF elements havecontent

the form <RDF: RDF>
< /RDF: RDF>, where content is an85

Definition 6•(RDFterm)

An RDF term is a formula of the form:•
where• t is a tag type in Tor a tag variable in TVAR,• n ~ 0 and Pi is a P-variable in PVAR or I'i takes
the form b=c, where-b E BVAR and c E Cu CVAR u ./4, or-

beB-{CONTENT}andceCuCVAR,or-b = CONTENT and CE Cu CVAR u ./4.

••

T-variables are those that start with the prefix"T'VAR: " and can only be specialized to RDF
terms in ./4,
B-variables are those that start with the prefix"BVAR: " and can only be specialized toattribute names in B,
C-variables are those that start with the prefix"CVAR:" and can only be specialized toconstants in C, andP-variables are those that start with the prefix"PVAR: " and can only be specialized to sets of
P-variables in 2PVAR or pairs of attribute andvalue.

Definition 7

The order of the Pi, called attributes is immaterial.
uu'L''"'"'"' attributes are not differentiated 1. Moreover,amibute narries other than CONTENT can not appear
ocsce in the same tag. D./4 is the set of all RDF terms constructed fromthe elements in T, B, C, TVAR, BVAR and PVAR. □Definition 8

L Terms taking the form of:<t

P 1 ...

Pi-1(./4, the set ofRDF terms)(RDF tree)

An RDF tree is an equivalent
representation of an RDF term

CONTENT="c"

Pi+l ...

graphical

Pn> </ t>,where c E C, and<t

P 1 ...

Pi-l

CONTENT=a

Pi+l ...

Pn> <It>,

where t is shown as an ellipse node and the Pi as
immediate subtrees of the node t denoted by sub; (seeFigure 1-a); if

where a E ./4,
are normally written as:

1. Pi is a P-variable, the subtree representing Pi willconsist of a single circle node representing Pi (seeFigure 1-b),
2. Pi takes the form b=c,2.1. if c is a constant or a C-variable, the subtree
representing Pi has as its root a circle node
representing b, connected to a child rectangle
node representing c (see Figure 1-c),
2.2. if c is an RDF term, the subtree representing
Pi has as its root a circle node representing b,
connected to an RDF tree representing theterm c (see Figure 1-d).

respectively. RDF terms taking the first form arecalled simple terms and those in the second form
are nested terms. In addition, simple terms with no
attributes or those taking the form
< t > </ t >are said to be in atomic form and called atomic
terms.

Denote the RDF tree of the term a by tree(a).

2. The distinctions between T-variables, B-variables,
C-variables and P-variables are:

1 Note that two attributes b□

By the definition of RDF trees, a particular RDF
tree, representing the term a, is considered to be a 3leveled tree, which contains- at the first level, an ellipse node, representing the
tag type or T-variable of the term a,- at the second level, circle nodes representing
attribute names, B-variables and P-variables of a,= v 1 and b = v 2 , where v 1 *v 2 are not considered to be duplicate.

86

(a)

t

Figure 1. The RDF tree.
-

at the third level, rectangle nodes and immediate
subtrees, which, respectively, represent atomic
values, C-variables and other terms nested in a; inparticular, these rectangle nodes and subtrees
provide corresponding values for the attributenames and B-variables at the second level.

Definition 9

The following notion of an expandable term will
be used in the definition of the specialization
mapping, vR (Definition 11).

Definition 10(Expandable term)

Let the EXP attribute be the attribute-value pair
written as EXP=" here". Define an expandable term(~. the set of ground RDF terms)

as a term t in A which contains the EXP attribute.
~ is that subset of--4 which consists of all ground(variable-free) terms in _,4.

Then, let _j./R be the subset of A that consists of allD

expandable terms in _,4.

In other words, ~ is the set of ground RDF terms,
assuming one of the forms:

Definition 11orCVAR)) u (PVAR x ({CONTENT} x /4)) u (PVAR x<t b1="C1" ... bn="Cn" CONTENT=g1 .. ,CONTENT=gm> </ t>,{ B }),

specialization mapping vR: GR -; partial_map(/4) isdefined as follows:{CONTENT},-

the gi are RDF terms in ~-(TVAR x T) u (TVAR x _j./R) u (TVAR x
where 2PVAR is the power set of PVAR. The

2PVAR) u

where- t is a tag type in T,- the bi are all distinct attribute names in B the c; are constants in C, and( vR, a specialization mapping)

Let GR be (BVAR x (B - {CONTENT})) u (BVAR x{CONTENT}) u (CVAR x C) u (PVAR x (BVAR x<t b1="c1" ... bn="cn" C0NTENT="Cn+1"> <It>-

0

1. Attribute Name Restriction•

When e = (bvar, b){CONTENT}),87

E

BVAR x (B -

if the values corresponding to bvar, for all
occurrences of bvar in a, are constants or Cvariables, thenwhere a' is obtained by replacing all
occurrences of pvar in a by the sequence ofpvar1, pvar2 , ... , and pvarn separated bywhitespaces.

5. Tag Type Restriction
where a' is obtained byoccurrences of bvar in a by b;

replacingall•

When e = (tvar, t) e TVAR x T,

otherwise VR(e) is not applicable to a.
•where a' is obtained byoccurrences of tvar in a by t.

When e = (bvar, b) e BVAR x {CONTENT},

replacingall

6. Term Restriction

where a' is obtained byoccurrences of bvar in a by b.

replacingall•

if all tvar terms 2 nested in a (in any level) only
occur in atomic form, then

2. Constant Restriction•

When e = (cvar, c) e CVAR x C,

where a' is obtained by replacing
occurrences of cvar in a by "c".

where a' is obtained by replacing all
occurrences of tvar terms, written as "<tvar>< I tvar> ", in a by the term a";all

3. Attribute-Value-Pair Restriction•

When e = (tvar, a") E TVAR x ./4,

otherwise vR(e) is not applicable to a.

When e = (pvar, (bvar, cvar))(BVAR x CVAR),E

PVAR x•When e = (tvar, h) E TVAR x .J.JR,
if no tvar term nested in a (in any level) occurs
in atomic form, thenwhere a' is obtained by replacing all
occurrences of pvar in a by the pair bvar=cvar.
•

When e = (pvar, (b, a"))ewhere a' is obtained by replacing each tvar
term nested in a by h and the EXP attribute in h
by attributes of that tvar term;

PVAR x({CONTENT} x ./4),

otherwise vR(e) is not applicable to a.
where a' is obtained by replacing
occurrences of pvar in a by the pair b=a".

•all

When e = (tvar, €) e TVAR x {€},
if all tvar terms nested in a (in any level) takethe form <tvar> CONTENT <ltvar>, where

4. P-variable Expansion

CONTENT E C u ./4, then•

When e = (pvar, {pvar1, ... , pvarn}) E PVAR x
2PVAR,
2tvar terms have the form <tvar attr1<ltvar>, where n ~ 0.

88

•.•

attrn>

VR(e)(a) = a' e /4,

3. Definition 9 has already states that ~ is a subset of/4.

where a' is obtained by removing all
occurrences of <tvar> and < / tvar> from a;■

3.3. Specialization System for RDF Elements

otherwise vR(e) is not applicable to a.

The specialization system for RDF elements will
be constructed by means of the specialization system
for RDF terms, defined in Sub-section 3.2.

D
Definition 12 ( Sa, the set of specializations, andthe mapping µR)

Definition 14 (.A, the set of RDF elements)

Let Sa = (CB)*, the set of all sequences on CB·

Let ..A be the set of all formulae in form of

Based on VR, the mapping µR; Sa ➔ partial_map(/4)
is:<RDF:RDF> t 1 t 2 ... tn</RDF:RDF> where t 1 isan RDF term in /4. Elements in ..A are called RDF
elements.

µR(A)(a) = a, where A denotes the null sequence,µR(e · s)(a) = µR(s)( VR(e)(a)), where e e CB, s e Sa□

Similar to RDF terms, RDF elements can also be
represented equivalently by RDF trees. Denote theand a e/4.

RDF tree of the element a in ..A by tree(a).

Note that µR(s)(a) is defined only if all eJements ins are successively applicable to a. □ca the set of ground RDF elements)

Definition 15

Definition 13 (Specialization system for RDF(} is that subset of ..A which consists of all groundterms)

objects in ..A.

□

The specialization system for RDF terms is r R =</4, ~' Sa, µR>,

Definition 16 ( S the set of specializations, and the0

mappingµ)Proposition 1 (Axiomatic requirements of thespecialization system for RDF terms)

Let S = Sa. The mappingµ: S ➔ partial_map(..A)
is defined by:

The specialization system for RDF terms in
Definition 13 satisfies the three requirements ofspecialization systems, i.e.,:µ(s)( <RDF: RDF> t1 t2 •.. tn < /RDF: RDF>)= <RDF: RDF> µR(s)(t1) PR(s)(t2) ... µR(s)(tn)<RDF:RDF>,

1. \;/s1, S2 E Sa, 3 s E Sa: µR(s) = µR(s1) 0 µR(s2),

2. 3 s e Sa, \;/a e /4: µR(s)(a) = a,3.

~ c /4.

where s e S and t; e /4.

0D

Definition 17 (Specialization system for RDF
elements)

Proof

The specialization system for RDF elements is r =1. In order to verify that r R satisfies the firstrequirement, let s1 = e1 e2 ... en and s2 = e/ e2' ...
em' . The definition of µR shows that there exists
s = e/ e2' ... em' e1 e2 ... en such that µR(s) = µR(s1) 0<.A.

a $ µ >. Elements of .A, (} and Sare called

atoms, ground atoms and specializations, respectively.

D

PR(s2),

Proposition 2 (Axiomatic requirements of the

2. Obviously, µR(A)(a) = a, for each a e /4, where A
is the null sequence.

specialization system for RDF elements)

89

The specialization system for the RDF elements in
Definition 17 satisfies the three requirements ofspecialization systems, i.e.,:

3.4. RDF Declarative Program
After the specialization system for RDF elements
is defined (cf. Definition 17), the definitions of RDF
definite clause, RDF declarative program and thedeclarative semantics of an RDF declarative program
are obtained direptly from Definitions 3, 4 and 5,
respectively.

l. 'efs1, s2 e S 3 s e S: µ(s) = µ(s1) µ(s2),0

2. 3 s e S 'efa e ..A: µ(s)(a) = a,3. (} c..A.

D

Proof Obvious from the definition of r R·■

P= { c1: a1 f-.

Cz: a2 f-.
C3: a/ f-a3.
C4: a/ f- a4. },where
a1 = <RDF:RDF><RDF:Description RDF:HREF="http://www.example.com/resourcel/"><DC:Title>Browsing the Internet</DC:Title><DC:Creator>Scott Ring</DC:Creator><DC:Subject>Internet</DC:Subject><DC:Subject>WWW</DC:Subject><DC:Subject>HTML</DC:Subject></RDF:Description></RDF:RDF>,
az = <RDF: RDF>
<RDF:Description RDF:HREF="http://www.example.com/resource2/"><DC:Title>Searching on the Web</DC:Title><DC:Creator>John Smith</DC:Creator><DC:Subject>Internet</DC:Subject><DC:Subject>WWW</DC:Subject><DC:Subject>Resource Discovery</DC:Subject></RDF:Description>< /RDF: RDF>,
a/= <RDF: RDF>
<TVAR:A><DC:Creator><RDF:Description><BIB:Name>John Smith</BIB:Name><BIB:Email>john@ait.ac.th</BIB:Email><BIB:Affiliation>Asian Institute of Technology</BIB:Affiliation></RDF:Description></DC:Creator></TVAR:A>< /RDF : RDF>,
a3 =<RDF:RDF><TVAR:A><DC:Creator>John Smith</DC:Creator></TVAR:A></RDF:RDF>,

a/= <RDF: RDF>
<TVAR:B>AIT</TVAR:B></RDF:RDF>,
a4 = <RDF : RDF>
<TVAR:B>Asian Institute of Technology</TVAR:B></RDF: RDF>.

Figure 2. Declarative Program P.

90

C stands for CONTENT.

RDF:RDF

Browsing the Internet

Scott Ring

Internet

WWW

HTML

http://www.example.com/resourcel/

Figure 3. tree(a 1), the RDF tree of atom a1•

Example: Let a declarative program Pon r, which
specifies a collection of Web resources, be defined in
Figure 2. Unit clauses c1 and c2 represent RDF
elements describing Web resources, non-unit clause c3
defines a rule which provides additional bibliographic
information of John Smith and non-unit clause c4
gives the abbreviated name of Asian Institute ofTechnology. In addition to these rules, which areintended to be simple for illustration, complex rules
can also be defined when one has to deal with more
complicated relationships between RDF elements.
RDF trees representing those atoms in P are depicted
in Figures 3 - 6.

4 Application to Web-based Resource
Discovery Problems: An Example
A Web resource described by RDF metadata canbe represented directly as a ground RDF element in (j.
In addition to these representations, rules can be used
to explicitly define (possibly complex) relationships
between RDF elements. A rule is simply written as an
RDF definite clause C, where head(C) is true, if all
atoms in body(C) are true, whence a collection of Web
resources can be specified by an RDF declarative
program P which comprises unit clauses, representing
selected Web resources, and non-unit clauses,
representing rules. The declarative meaning of P thenyields the set of ground atoms each of which
represents one Web resource in the specified
collection. A query, which expresses a user's
information need (possibly implicitly) is represented
by an atom in ..A, and the result of this query will be
the set of Web resources which can be specialized
from the query and is contained in the declarative
meaning of P.

A query which finds only documents whose
authors' affiliations are AIT and contain information
about Internet can be formulated as an atom q e ..A,i.e.,:
q = <RDF: RDF>
<RDF:Description PVAR:C><DC:Creator><RDF:Description PVAR:D><BIB:Affiliation>
AIT</BIB:Affiliation></RDF:Description></DC:Creator><DC:Subject>Internet</DC:Creator></RDF:Description>< /RDF: RDF>.

Based on these modeling concepts, a resource
discovery problem is formulated as an intersection
problem [2] between the set of RDF elements that
describe Web resources and the set of RDF elementsthat a query represents.

91

RDF:RDF

Searching on the Web

John Smith

Internet

WWW

http://www.example.com/resource2/

Resource Discovery

Figure 4. tree(a 2), the RDF tree of atom a2•(b) tree(a/)
RDF:RDFRDF:RDFTVAR:A

TVAR:AJohn Smith

John Smith

John@ait.ac.th

Asian Institute of Technology

Figure 5. tree(a 3 ) and tree(a/), the RDF trees of atoms a3 and a/.

92

(b) tree(al)RDF:RDFRDF:RDFTVAR:B

TVAR:BAIT

Asian Institute of Technology

Figure 6. tree(a4) and tree(a/), the RDF trees of atoms a4 and a/.

RDF:RDF

AIT

Figure 7. Query atom q and tree(q), the RDF tree of atom q.
T/(0) = { a1, a2},
T/(0) = { ai, a2, al},T/(0) = { ai, a2, ai', ai''}, andT/(0) = T/(0).

Figure 7 illustrates the RDF tree of the query atom q.
In processing such a query, first, define atoms ai' andaz" e q as in Figure 8. Recalling the definition of Tp(cf. Definition 4), one obtains:93

az' = <RDF: RDF>
<RDF: Description RDF: HREF=-"http://www. example. _comf.resource2 / "><DC:Title>Searching on the Web</DC:Title>'.
<DC:Creator><RDF:Description><BIB:Name>John Smith</BIB:Name><BIB:Email>johr,@ait.ac.th</BIB:Email><BI~:Affiliation>Asian Institute of Technology</BIB:Affiliation></RDF:"Description></DC:Creator><DC:Subject>Internet</DC:Subject><DC:Subject>WWW</DC:Subject><DC:Subject>Resource Discovery</DC:Subject></RDF:Description></RDF:RDF>
az'' = <RDF: RDF>
<RDF:Description RDF:HREF="http://www.example.com/resource2/"><DC:Title>Searching on the Web</DC:Title><DC:Creator><RDF:Description><BIB:Name>John Smith</BIB:Name><BIB:Email>john@ait.ac.th</BIB:Email><BIB:Affiliation>AIT</BIB:Affiliation></RDF:Description></DC:Creator><DC:Subject>Internet</DC:Subject><DC:Subject>WWW</DC:Subject><DC:Subject>Resource Discovery</DC:Subject></RDF:Description></RDF:RDF>

Figure 8. Atoms az' and az''.
Hence, the declarative meaning of P (cf. Definition 5),

1.

Akama, K., 1993. Declarative Semantics of Logic
Programs on Parameterized Representation
Systems. Advances in Software Science andTechnology, 5:45-63.

2.

Akama, K., Kawaguchi, Y. and Miyamoto, E.,
1998. Solving intersection problems using
equivalent transformation (in Japanese). Journalof the Japanese Society of Artificial Intelligence(submitted).

3.

Akama, K. and Wuwongse, V., 1997. EquivalentTransformation for Constrained Declarative
Programs on String Domains. Technical Report,
Computer Science and Information Management
Program, Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok,
Thailand.

4.

Bray, T., Paoli, J. and Sperberg-McQueen, C.M.,"Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0", Feb
1998. http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/.

5.

Lassila, 0. and Swick, R.R., "Resource
Description Framework (RDF) Model and
Syntax", 1998. http://www.w3.org/fR/WD-rdfsyntax/

M(P), includes atoms a 1, a2, az' and az''. Since query
atom q can be specialized to atom az'', i.e., there exists

0 eS such that q0= az'', the resource whose URI is
http:/ /WWW. example. com/resource2 / will
be retrieved.

5 Conclusions
The RDF is a kind of knowledge/information
representation which has no inference mechanism;
hence computation with its elements is very limited.
Apart from computation by pattern matching, othermeans of computation is difficult to devise under thepresent RDF form. This paper has proposed anddeveloped a theoretical foundation upon which
reasoning with RDF elements can be carried out.
Consequently, complicated computations with RDF
elements become possible. Complex queries, likethose of SQL in databases, about contents of theresource described by RDF elements can beformulated and handled. This is part of the future
research work.

References

94

A Graph-based Method for Automatic Generation ofMultilingual Keyword Clusters and Its Applications
Akiko AIZAWA, Noriko KANDO and Kyo KAGEURA
National Center for Science Information Systems
3-29-1 Otsuka, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 112-8640 Japan
Tel:+81-3-3942-6994,6968 ; Fax:+81-3-5395-7064
E-Mail: akiko@rd.nacsis.ac.jp

Abstract We are investigating an approach to automatic generationof Japanese-English bilingual keyword clusters using the keyword lists
assigned to academic papers by the authors. The bilingual clusters generated by our graph-based method contain keywords with similar meanings
from both languages and could be valuable linguistic resources in various
information retrieval (IR) applications. In this paper, we first present an
overview of our clustering method and then show several experimental
results to evaluate the generated clusters. We also discuss the limitationand possible extensions of the current implementation.
keywords cross-lingual information retrieval, automatic extraction of
thesaurus, bilingual corpus, graph theory, academic paper database1

Introduction

The explosive growth of online documents
has increased the need for IR systems thatcross language boundaries. For instance,since the first workshop on cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) in 1996 ( Grefenstette, Smeaton & Sheridan, 1996), the topic
has been one of the most actively pursued
hi IR research field. One especially interesting and important research to this direction is the automatic generation of domaindependent multilingual thesaurus; this not
only help searchers of multilingual scientific
databases but also are useful in monolingual
search since technical terms are often imported either in their original forms or asacronyms, transliterated, and then translated(Kando 1997).
Presently, we are investigating an approach to automatic generation of JapaneseEnglish bilingual keyword clusters using the95

keyword lists assigned to academic papers by
the authors (Aizawa & Kageura, 1998). The
bilingual clusters generated by our graphbased method contains keywords with similar meanings from both languages and could
be valuable linguistic resources in various IR
applications.
The basic idea of our clustering strategy
is that we apply graph theoretic method instead of statistical ones which seem dominant in corpus-based approaches; the bilingual keyword pairs constitute a tangled graphof Japanese and English keywords; as such,the clustering problem can be regarded as aproblem of partitioning the original keyword
graph by eliminating wrongly generated links
from the graph; then, the problem can betransformed into the minimum cut problem
in the graph theory.
Applying graph theoretic method has several advantages. First, low-frequency key-

words can be treated properly by utilizing topological features of the graph. Second, the clusters contain not only JapaneseEnglish pairs, but also Japanese-Japaneseand English-English pairs. Thus, they areusable for not only CLIR but also query expansion in monolingual IR. Third, the wholeprocess can be achieved with reasonable computational cost.
The keyword data in view of bilingual corpus also has several advantages.
In conventional corpus-based approaches for
CLIR (Dunning & D~vis, 1993; Landauer &Littman, 1990; Carbonell, 1997), the lack ofreadily available parallel corpora has been abottleneck. On the other hand, our corpus isavailable for a great many subject domains,with rich variations that may not be listed in
the standard dictionaries but are neverthelessmeaningful and useful in IR. Another advantage of our keyword corpus is that keyword
pairs can be easily extracted without expensive natural language processing for segmentation and alignment.
In the following, we first briefly summarize the outline of our clustering method andthen report several experimental results toevaluate the generated clusters; comparison
with standard dictionaries, analyzing errors
in the clustering, and the performance withbilingual and monolingual IR. We also discuss the limitation and possible extensions of
the current implementation.

(8)output of final clustering results. Eachstage is described briefly in the following.

2.1

Extraction of Japanese-English
Keyword Pairs

The basic data used in the current study is
the Japanese and English keywords assignedby the authors to their papers, extracted fromthe NACSIS Academic Conference Database(NACSIS, 1997). We selected 28,122 papers
related to the field of computer science. Of
the papers selected, 26,060 (about 93 %) havethe same number of Japanese and English
keywords. An example is :Japanese: ~ § m~~ / JIU! 7 7 7- ?' / 7' 7 7 :ffl!
~ / NACSIS7'-?7~-7'
English: cross-lingual information retrieval/ keyword cluster / graph theory / NACSIS Database.

Since the Japanese and English keyword pairs
generally maintain good one-to-one correspondences, we mechanically extract total
112,364 Japanese and English keyword pairs(60,186 different ones) and use them as a basic bilingual keyword corpus.
Table 1 shows some examples of the extracted keyword pairs. The most general English translation for each Japanese keyword
is marked with'*'·2.2

Simple Normalization

After the extraction of bilingual keyword
pairs, simple normalization is applied todeal with notation variation problem suchas cross-lingual and Cross Lingual. Also,
2 Overview of Multilingual Keyword
acronyms are detected and marked so that
Cluster Generation Procedurethey can be tested for homonyms at later
Our procedure for generating multilingual stage.
keyword clusters is composed of the following stages: (l)extraction of Japanese-English 2.3 Generation of Initial Keyword
Graphkeyword pairs from basic corpus, (2)simple
normalization, (3)generation of initial key- The initial graph expression of a bilingual
word graph, (4)screening obvious non-errors, keyword corpus is easily derived by represent(5)detection of possible correspondence er- ing Japanese and English keywords as nodes
rors, (6)detection of possible homonymous and their translation pairs as links. The frewords, (7)partitioning keyword clusters, and quency of the keyword pair appeared in the96Table 1: Example of Japanese-English keyword correspondences extracted from thedatabase.
Japanese keywords English keywords
frequency:\=--7-1''
information retrieval
1:\=--7-1"
keyword39*
information retrieval
1-r:\=-.::z. Ht#text retrieval
6*-r :\=- .A 1- ~#text search
3
7 :\=- .::Z. 1- ~#keyword
1
t~#-t~~minformation retrieval
1
J.t~11¥1!~#information gathering
4•11ffl~#information retreival1
fflffltt#information retrieval
320* Figure 1: Initial keyword graph generated
ilffl~#information search
5 from keyword pairs in Table 1.
fflffl~#information gathering6*
11fflijJ[~
information retrieval
1
ilfflijJl~
at later stages.
bibliographic search
1*
Jt~~#document retrieval
11
Jt~~~
document retrieval
19* 2.5 Detection of Possible CorresponJtl!f~#dence Errors
text retrieval1
Jtl!ft~#-corpus is expressed as the capacity of the corresponding links. Figure 1 shows the initial
keyword graph generated from the keyword
pairs shown in Table 1.
The global keyword graph is composed ofnumbers of disjoint sub-graphs, which we define as bilingual keyword clusters. In case of
the above example, the whole nodes belong to
the same keyword cluster at the initial stage
and thus are considered to have similar meanings.

2.4

Screening Obvious Non-Errors

This stage currently includes ( 1)recognitionof Japanese and English pairs with identical notations, (2)checking keyword pairs with
sufficient frequencies, and (3)detecting minor
examples. The last case applies when a keyword pair stands for the unique translation ofeither of the Japanese or English counterpart.
Links which satisfy the above conditions are
consider·ed to be correct and maintained automatically to reduce the computation cost
97

The initial keyword graph constructed from60,186 different translation pairs contains ahuge keyword cluster with as many as 20,659
nodes (about 34%) in it. Since our subject isrestricted to the specific academic field computer science, the major cause for this is theexistence of improper translation pairs whichconnects otherwise disjoined keyword clusters
into one ( This is in contrast to general cases
where -the homonyms are much more common). A typical example found in Figure 1 isthe link < -=t- - r; - V (keyword), information
retrieval >.
The detection algorithm employed in our
procedure is based on a simple principlethat a set of links which decompose a connected keyword cluster into disjoint subclusters when they are removed from the original cluster are the candidates of impropertranslations. In the conventional graph theory, such a link set is called an edge cut andthe edge cut with the minimal total capacity
among all the edge cuts obtained for a graphis called a minimum edge cut. Minimum edge
cut problem is one of the most principal prob-

lems in the graph theory and there exist num- N13 frequencies. We presently set Na = N13( =ber of algorithms which guarantee sufficient N) and use the same value for all the clusters.
performance for our purpose.
Once candidates for improper translations
are obtained, partitioning is done automati2.6 Detection of Possible Homonyms cally by removing the links on the originalThough homonyms do not seem to occur so graph expression. Homonyms can be simfrequently in a specific scientific-domain, we ilarly processed by splitting the nodes into
still have observed several cases such as < different clusters. The detection and deletion
ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode)> and stages described so far is applied for each keyword cluster recursively until no more pairs< ATM (Automatic Teller Machine) >.
canbe removed.
The detection of possibly homonymous
keywords can also be done utilizing the topological feature of the keyword cluster. It 2.8 Final Clustering Results
can be assumed that homonymous nodes are Figure 2 shows the result of the partitioning
the ones which decompose the cluster when of the keyword cluster given in Figure 1.
-the node and all the edges starting from thenode are removed. Thus, the problem istransformed again to the well-known nodecut problem of the graph theory. Since
most of the homonyms we havt observed areacronyms, we presently consider only keywords composed of English capital charactersand symbols as candidates as node cuts.

2. 7

Partitioning Keyword Clusters

The minimum edge cut of a keyword cluster does not always represent imprecise translation. Removing correct pairs inevitablycauses oversplitting, i.e. generating morethan one clusters with similar meanings. On
the other hand, the distinction between corresponding keyword pairs and associated but
not corresponding ones depends on the application and is difficult even for human experts.
For example, the keyword pair < 7 ~ A rt_t~ ( text retrievaQ, information retrieval >may be improper in view of strict terminological definition but not necessarily be incorrect
for searchers of academic paper databases.
Our current implementation employs asimple stopping criteria: partitioning occurs
only when (l}the total capacity of the minimum edge cut is equal or less than Na, andalso (2}each of the newly generated clusters
contains at least one nodes with greater than98

Figure 2: Example of partition of keyword
cluster.
As a result of the detection of correspondence errors, three keyword pairs < ~- r; - r.. (keyword), information retrieval>,< T ~ A r tt~ (text retrievaQ, information
retrieval>, <Jt:fl:tt~ (document retrievaQ,text retrieval>, are removed, and four clusters A, B, C, and Dare newly created. The
bold lines shows that the links are marked as
unremovable at screening stage. This follows
that such pairs as <ffl¥1itt~ (information
retrievaQ, information retreival> (spelling
error), <tt~ffi7Fffi (keyword), keyword>(rare case), and <T.t~·M¥!ltt~ (wide-area information retrieval), information retrieval>Keywords attached by the authors(Japanese and English)

Database of Academic Papers(1) Automatic Coupling of Translation Pairs

Noisy

Bilingual Keyword Corpus

L..-----~~------'(2)Simple Normalization to Deal with Notation
Variation Problem(3) Generation of Initial Keyword Clusters

Tangled~------"'-""-----~
Initial Keyword Clustersr;==:=:=:=:=:=:=:=;io~Identical Terms(4)Simple Screening

FArequency
cronyms(-->Use of Standard
Dictionaries, optional(5) Detection of Possible Errors by Solving
Minimum Cut Problem

Candidates for

Candidates for~~Translation
Errors)/_, -·-·;;: ·······_.:~~·.,····~:monyms(6)Disambiguation utilizing~=-·,,, . .A'

which link to selectfor deletion ?

~f::~:~~iz:etween

C:,-:.:..:r. ••..

.,,.

_,,. 0.

··.

when spht, whichcluster should it go ?

"'~·Keyword Strings(--> Natural Language

Processing,not implemented now)

(7) Partitioning Clusters by Removing
Errorous Edges and by Splitting
Homonymous Nodes
Partitioned Clusters(8) If No More Partitioning. Output the
Final Clusters using the Original
Notatoins of the Keywords and Stop.

(5)(6)(7) applied recursively

Figure 3: Overview of the proposed keyword clustering procedure.
(related but not equivalent pair) are maintained even after the partitioning.
Applying the method to the whole corpus
with N = 5, 1,469 of the total 60,186 keyword pairs were deleted, generating the total 27,918 keyword clusters. The number of
keyword pairs included in the biggest cluster
was reduced to 159 from 20,659 of the initial graph. The overall procedure describedin this section is illustrated in Figure 3.

ies and handbooks of the field of computerscience (Aiso, 1993; Japan Society for Artificial Intelligence 1990; Ralston, 1983; Shapiro,
1987).
The comparison shows that the numberof common elements between the corpus data
and the standard technical dictionaries is relatively small, i.e. many of the keyword pairs
assigned by the authors are not listed in
the standardized technical dictionaries. This
may partly be because the keyword data con3 Experimental Results
tains some noises such as spelling errors or
3.1 Comparison and integration with notation variations 1 . The noises themselves
are useful in IR task since they may also be
standard dictionaries

1 The number of common elements are increased to
In Table 2, the keyword corpus we use in our
3,074
from 2,066 after simple normalization to deal
study is compared with total 22,690 differwith notation variation.
ent term pairs extracted from four dictionar-

99

Table 2: Comparison of the technical dictionaries and the bilingual keyword data.

Japanese words
English words
different translation pairs
average number of translations per word(Jpn)
average number of translations per word(Eng)maximum number of translations per word(Jpn)
maximum number of translations per word(Eng)number of English acronyms (Jpn)
number of English acronyms (Eng)identical Japanese and English pairs

found in queries of databases.
Another important point shown in the table is that the Japanese keywords often contains English acronyms in both standard dictionaries and in keyword corpus. The fact
supports our assumption that bilingual keyword clusters should be valuable not only
for CLIR but also in Japanese monolingual
search.
Table 3 shows how the ratio of common
pairs between the dictionaries and the corpus
changes against the frequencies they appear
in the corpus. We can observe that the more
frequent a keyword pair appears in the corpus, the higher is the probability it is also referred in the standard dictionaries. For example, among 68 pairs with more than 100 frequencies, only 10 are not referred in the standard dictionaries. They are mostly acronyms
or terms representing relatively new technologies: i.e. { CAI, CASE, CSCW, LOTOS,OSI, WWW, agent, multi media, genetic algorithm, reuse }. The average frequency ofthe common pairs in the corpus is 5.9 before
normalization and 11.1 after normalization.
In clnclusion, it can be expected that the
keyword corpus reflects particular views andconcepts of the aµthors, which can not becovered with the standard dictionaries. Upon

dictionary
terms
20,636
19,562
22,690
1.10
1.16
7
6
844
451
57

corpuspairs
37,17049,91860,186
1.62
1.21
86
29
1,007
1,233
1,336

commonfor both
3,966
2,814
2,066

-

212
114
18

Table 3: The ratio of common terms against
the frequency.
frequency
morethan N
1
2
5
10
20
50
100
200

num. ofkeyword
pairs
51062
10990
2916
1216
538
176
68
24

num. ofcommon
pairs
3074
1999
1062
606
326
127
58
24

ratio

0.06
0.18
0.36
0.50
0.61
0.72
0.85
1.00

a extraction of basic keyword corpus, words
from standard dictionaries can easily be integrated (with frequencies set to the infinite)
to introduce more generality in .the original
corpus data. The effect of such integration is
examined in later through IR evaluations.

3.2

Analyzing clustering result

The noise in the keyword corpus can be categorized into either of the following groups(the examples shown for each group are theEnglish correspondings to the Japanese term"·ltflH~;f (information retrieval)"):rors, 10 are caused by homonymous keywords
Table 4: Errors detected at the first iterationthat are not acronyms, 8 by mis-processedof partitioning.
acronyms, and 9 by minor examples that errors actually occur more frequently than cortotal errors detected951
rect pairs in the corpus.
(1) spelling error
0(2) expressional variations
0
The result shows that the major improve(3) related keywords
598
ment can be expected by refining conditions(4) obvious errors
326
for links elimination after minimum cuts de27(5) correct
tection stage. Our present implementation
use only graph-topological conditions, Na
and N 13 , common for all the clusters. Bet( 1) spelling errors
ter results may be obtained by changing theexample: information retreival
value depending on the cluster size or by ap( 2) expressional variations
plying natural language processing. Since
example: information retrieving
the number of candidates are greatly reducedby minimum cuts detection stage, the dis( 3) related keywords
ambiguation of errors and non-errors can be
example: information seeking
more time consuming.
(4) obvious errors
In the following, a few examples of theexample: keyword
generated keyword clusters are shown where
When generating keyword clusters, it is ad- the number in the parenthesis indicates thevantageous to maintain spelling errors and frequency of the keyword. Example 1 shows
expressional variations in view of recall, while the keywords in the biggest cluster with their
it is important to eliminate obvious errors in frequencies 2 3. We can observe the closely
view of precision. The treatment of related related Japanese and English keywords are
keywords should depend on the database and clustered together.
also the context of the search.
Example 1: Frequent keywords in the largest cluster.
We analyze manually the errors detected
Japanese: siHIJ!l.!bJ.! {740), ~§lj {62}, ~§IJ{t {56),at the first iteration of the cluster partition~§IJ~lji: {29), ~fi!l.lbJ.t {19), ~§IJtl: (10), ~§IJ 1/
7-. j-L. {6}, ~~!l.lbJ.i {6}, ~fr:,, 7-. °r L. (5), 7 Jv-fing, i.e. the minimum cut links with the ca70 D-l:! 7-. (5), ~§lj7'0{!7-. (4), ~§lj}t {3}, ~~7•
pacity equal to 1. The result is summarized
O {! 7-. (3), 7 Jv-f-7° O {!:,,::.,, :7· (3), J~7 v Jv!l.lbJ.i
in Table 4. Of the total 951 pairs detected as{3)
errors, 326 are obvious errors, 598 are related
English: parallel processing{672}, parallel{74),but not exactly corresponding, and 27 are deparallelization{44), concurrent processing {20 ),parallel computing{18}, parallel computation{18},tected wrongly though they actually are theparallelism{14}, parallel process(B), multi procorrect ones. It is remarkable that regardlesscess{8}, concurrent system(7), parallel system{6),of the considerable number of spelling errors
parallel processings(6), multi processing(6), multiand expressional variations included in theprocessing{5), multiprocess(5), concurrent{5}, future{4), parallelize(4), parallel processes(4), paraldatabase, non of them are detected as errors.
lel operation{4), paralell processing{4)This may be because such errors or variations
occur most likely with low frequency and sel- Example 2 contains two clusters which are
dom are repeated in different clusters.
originally a single cluster but separated sinceAmong 598 related pairs, 136 have hierar- each of the clusters has sufficient frequency
chical relationship while the rest are the ones in the target corpus. Again, we show only
simply correlated. Among 27 detection er- the keywords with their frequencies 2 3 on

101

3.3

account of the limited space.
Example 2 : Associated clusters devided into two.

(1) CLUSTER 1
Japanese: 9:□ l'.19 cai(118}, ITS(67), 9i□ l'.19fxW1/ 7-.
"J-1,. {31}, ICAI(11}, 9:□ l'.19mf1/7-."J-l,. (8), tlf!~:n~ (7), fxtlli!!G~ (7), r..~fUJrf9 (4), 5EA1t (4), fx
wli!!G~ (4J, N~J!M (3J, ttw~,J~ (3J
English: ITS(68}, intelligent cai(65}, 'intelligent
tutoring system{45), ICAI{30}, intelligent educational system(9), tutoring strategy(8}, teachingstrategy(8}, IES{7}, teaching paradigm(3}, object
understanding{3), intelligent tutoring systems{3)( 2) CLUSTER 2
Japanese: CAI{l 56}, fxw:tti 1/ 7-. "J-1,. (27}, i¥xw:tti r21J, ~f9:tti {13J, ~ffl:tti1/ 7-. r_J.,. (8J,
cai 1/ 7-. "J-1,. (7), CAL{6), ~}ilfii.rtt (4), iJR~gft (4),~ffl:ttifflf.l (4J, :::r ✓ 1:: .: r. 1:ttifxw {3J
English: CAI{169}, computer assisted instruction(27}, computer aided instruction(8), CAL(7),education support system{6}, derivative(4), caisystem{4), surface structure{3}, learning support{3}, education suport(3), computer assisted
learning{3)Example 3 shows another but smaller cluster with all the Japanese and English keywords included. It can be observed that minor translation examples are integrated into
more frequent cases.
Example 3 : An output including minor keywords.
Japanese: CAD{246}, ~!t:tti (63}, !t.ffitiffl~!t (14), !t•ffi:tti!!it!t (9), ::i:,,, l:'..::r..:9':tti~!t(8), :::r :,, l:'. .: r. :$' tiffl ~!t (4), ::i :;,, 1 '{ 1 Jt, i 7 (4),~atI~ (3J, 4-\' r' {3J, ~ati :;,,:J.::.? 1J :,,,~f r2J,
it•ffii!itat:tti (2J, 'J 7 1- '7 .:r. 7~at:tti (2J, 9:□~~ (1), ElNll*iJ.jl (1), .:::OO~l.lM (1), ,tt~ti.i:J!
~!t (1), !t.tiffl~!t (1), ?J!-~1/ .:r. 7 (1), :::r:;,,l:'. .: r. :$'7·1f 1:,,, (1)English: CAD{225), computer aided design(70),design support{36}, design engineering{6}, software design support{4), design assistance(2),cad(2}, support to plan(l}, support method fordesign{l}, software design suppo'rt(l}, prulog{l},planning aids{l}, operator resource sharing(l),design = support(l}, design suppore system{l},design suppont{l}, design suppert(l}, design suport{l}, design assist{l}, desighn support(l}, computer cided design{l}, computer aidid design{l},computer aided disign(1), computer aided desigh{1}, compile time errors(l), compile error{l),co'mputer aided design(l}, assisted design{l},DAD(l}

102

Query Expansion in Cross-lingual
Information Retrieval

Lastly, We examine the effectiveness of thegenerated clusters on the two retrieval tasks:(1) CLIR: Japanese queries retrieving documents from an English collection (J-E
task), and(2) monolingual IR: Japanese queries retrieving documents from a Japanesecollection (J-J task).
The search performance is tested against thetest version of the NACSIS Test Collection 1(Kando et al, 1998) for the J-E task E collection, which contains 186,809 documents, andfor the J-J task, J collection, 338,668 documents.
We indexed Japanese terms by character (uni-gram), and English terms by word.
English terms appeared in Japanese texts
were also indexed by word. Queries are
submitted as Japanese natural language sentences. They were initially segmented intowords using a Japanese morphological analyzer, Chasen vl.5 (Matsumoto, et al., 1997).
Words and phrases were then automaticallyselected asn query terms using several patterns defined over part-of-speech tags.
Each query term was translated or expanded using the bilingual keyword clusters
reported here. We treated terms in the cluster, containing the query term, as synonyms.
In order to examine the effect of standard dictionary integration and also partitioning parameter N, we tested these strategies listed
below; K3: keyword clusters obtained with
N = 3, KD3: keyword and dictionary term
clusters obtained with N = 3, KDlO: keyword and dictionary term clusters obtainedwith N = 10, D3: dictionary terms in KD3,
and DlO: dictionary terns in KDlO. The average numbers of translated or expanded terms
per a query term are shown in Table 5.
The search engine is OpenText 6, which
can handle both English and Japanese char-Table 5: Average number of expanded terms (D 3, DlO).
The retrieval results for the J-J task are
per a query.
summarized in Figure 5 where each plot represents the 11 point average search effectiveKD3 KDlO
D3
K3
DlO
ness over the baseline, which in this case is
3.66 0.84 0.77
I J-E 6.81 4.48
5.72
1.4
1.3
I J-J 10.7 7.01
the performance without query expansion.

acters. The documents in the returned set are
ranked using Op~nText's "RankMode Relevancel".
The retrieval results for the J-E task aresummarized in Figure 4 where each plot
represents the search effectiveness comparedwith the baseline, which is obtained by applying the original Japanese query terms to theJapanese correspondings of the target English
documents.

0.9,------,.----,.----r---~----.
0.8

K3

0.7

KD3

0.6

0.5
§

:s 0.4

KDI0
D3
D10
base1ine --

l o.3
0.2
0.1
0 o!:--_ _..,,..0.-,-2_ _0,,,_.4-,--rec_a_ll-,0...,.6_ _..,,..0.-,-8_ - - - J

Figure 5: Retrieval results of J-J task.
0.45,------,----.----,-----,----,For the J-J task, all the strategies showedtheimprovement of search effectiveness of
KD3
KDIO
11.3-13.9% in the average over the baseline.
D3
D10
Though the average numbers of expanded§
terms were significantly small in the dictio0.2
0.15
nary clusters (D3, D10), they showed as same
0.1
as, or even more improvement of search ef0.05
fectiveness over the baseline. Again, there
0 o!:--_ _..,,..0..,,..2_ _0,,,_.4-,--re-ca-ll_,0...,.6_ _..,,..0..,..8- - - - I
were no significant difference according theclustering parameter in the keyword and dictionary clusters (KD3 and KDlO); Some imFigure 4: Retrieval results of J-E task.
provement is observed in the dictionary only
clusters(D3 and KlO).
For the J-E task, the keyword clusters
Based on the results, we can temporarily(K3) showed the highest effectiveness, thenconcludethat the bilingual clusters generated
followed by the keyword and dictionary term
clusters (KD3 and KDlO). The clusters con- by our method showed significant improvesisted of dictionary terms only (D3 and DlO) ment of search effectiveness both in CLIR andachieved less than 65% of the K3. The num- monolingual IR. In CLIR, the bilingual clusber of translated terms seems to be an impor- ters of author-assigned keywords (K3) weretant index to estima-t-e the search effective- more effective than the ones with dictionary
ness in the J-E task. No significant difference terms, while in monolingual IR, adding dicwas found regarding the minimum edge cut tionary terms to the clusters (KDlO) showed
levels of 3 and 10 in the keyword and dic- improvement. It is also observed that thetionary clusters (KD3, KDlO), but some im- clustering parameter N affects the perforprovement is shown in the dictionary clusters mance in some cases, suggesting that fur0.4

K3

l

103

ther improvement can be expected by refining
clustering conditions. The IR experiments
described here will be explained more in detail (Kando & Aizawa, 1998).
4

Discussions[3] Aiza.'wa, A. and Kageura, Kyo (1998}
An Approach to the Automatic Generation of Multilingual Keyword Clusters.
COMPTERM'98.
[4] Dunning, T. and Davis, M. (1993) Multilingual information retrieval. Technical report MCCS-93-252, Computer ResearchLaboratory, New Mexico State University.

The keyword clusters generated by our
method can also be utilized in automatic in- [5) Landauer, T.K. and Littman, M.L. (1990}
Fully automatic cross-language document
dexing such as LSI (latent semantic indexing)
retrieval. In Proceedings of the Sixth Conto reduce the dimension of the frequency maference on Electronic Text Research, p.3138.
trix by term clustering. Also, the clusters
generated by our graph-based method but us- [6) Carbonell, J.G., Yang, Y., Frederking, R.E.,
Brown, R.D., Geng, Y. and Lee, D. {1997)
ing only dictionary terms are utilized in doTranslingual information retrieval: a commain map visualization task to assist -interparative evaluation. In Proceedings of theactive document retrieval (Aihara & Takasu,
15th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-97), p.708-714.
1998).
Though our present implementation use [7] NACSIS (1997) Introduction to the National
only graph-topological information, we areCenter for Science Information Systems.
NACSIS.
now looking for the possibility of incorporating natural language processing. For exam- [8] Aiso, H. (ed.) (1993) Joho Syori Yogo Daijiten. Tokyo: Ohm.
ple, only keyword level correspondences are
considered so far but given that many key- [9] Japan Society for Artificial Intelligence(ed.) (1990) Jinko Tinou Handobukku.
words are complex, we can expect better perTokyo: Ohm.
formance by utilizing morpheme (or word)level correspondences. This will also give a [10] Ralston, A. (ed.) {1983) Encyclopedia of
Computer Science and Engineering. Amway to weight the bilingual pairs according tosterdam: Van Nostrand Reinhold. [Toutheir centrality within a cluster and to control
jou, A. (trans. ed.) Compyu-ta Daihyakka.
Tokyo: Asakura. 1987.]
the granularity of the generated cluster.
[11] Shapiro, S (ed.) (1987) Encyclopedia of ArAcknowledgementtificial Intelli!Jence. New York: John Wiley.
[Ohsuga, S. {trans. ed.) Jinko Tinou DaiThe research reported here is a part ofjiten. Tokyo: Maruzen. 1991.]
the research project "A Study on Ubiquitous
Koyama,T.,
Oyama,K.,
Information System for Utilization of Highly [12] Kando,N.,
Kageura,K., Yoshioka,M., Nozue,T., MatDistributed Information Resources", granted
sumura,A. and Kuriyama,K. {1998) NTCIR
by the Japan Society for the Promotion of: NACSIS Test Collection Project [Poster].
the 20th Annual BCS-IRSG Colloquium on
Science.
Information Retrieval Research.

References[13] Matsumoto, Y. et al. (1997) Japanese Morphological Analyzer Chasen 1.5. NAIST.
[1] Grefenstette, G., Smeaton, A. and Sheridan, P. (eds.) (1996) Workshop on Cross- [ ] Kando, N. and Aizawa, A. (1998) Cross14
Linguistic Information Retrieval.
Lingual Information Retrieval using AutomaticalJy Generated Multilingual Keyword[2] Kando, N. (1997) Cross-linguistic scholarly
Clusters IRAL'98 (submitted).
information trans/er and database services
in Japan. Presented at the Annual Meeting [15] Aihara, K. and Takasu, A. (1998) Domainof the American Society for Information SciVisualization Based on Authorized Docuence.
ments SCI '98/ISAS '98.

104

An Intelligent Search for Thai Text in Digital Libraries

Asanee Kawtrakul, Thanussak Thanyasiri, Chavalit Chirarattachan,Nathavit Buranapraphanont, Preeti Piti-alongkorn, Navapat Khantonthong
Natural Language Processing and Intelligent lnformation System
Technology Research Laboratory,
Computer Engineering Department Faculty of Engineering, Kasetsart University
Email: [ak,g40tht,g40cvc,g40nab,g40prtp,g40nak]@ku.ac. th

Soontharee Koompairojn
Computer Science Department, Faculty of Science, Kasetsart University
Email: [fscisok@ku.ac.th]

Abstract
One of technologies for next generation of Digital Library is information accesstechnology. Since the direction of future digital library is expected to handling large
collections of electronic documents, such as technical articles; journals; thesis;
scientific reports, the ability to search for bibliographic records, eg. complex boolean,phrase proximity, is not sufficient. This paper proposes integrating technologies :natural language processing and retrieval processing that enable efficient access toThai text in Digital Library.

Keywords:

Digital Library, Natural language processing, Text Retrieval

105

AUTHOR INDEX
Adachi, Jun ................................................................................. 40
Aizawa, Akiko .............................................................................. 94
Anutariya, Chutiporn ....................................................................... 82
Baker, Thomas ..................... ·......................................................... 72
Bright, Myron ............................................................................... 46
Chirarattanachan, Chavalit ............................................................. 104
Choi, Han Suk ............................................................................... 73
Dartois, Myriam ............................................................................ 74
Fullerton, Karen ....................................................................... , ... 46
Greenberg, Jane ............................................................................. 46
Kageura, Kyo ............................................................................... 94
Kanda, Noriko .............................................................................. 94
Kawtrakul, Asanee ..................................................................... 104
Khantonthong, Navapat .................................................................. 104
Kikuta, Masahiro......................................................................... 6
Kita, Katsuichi .............................................................................. 64
Koompairojn, Soontharee ............................................................... 104
Maeda, Akira ............................................................................... 74
Maeda, Harumi ............................................................................. 64
McClure, Maureen ....................................................................... 46
Miller, Eric .................................................................................. 71
Nagata, Y oshikatsu ...................................................................... 64
Nakao, Shigetaka ........................................................................... 74
Nantajeewarawat, Ekawit ................................................................. 82
Nuranaprophanont, Nathavit ............................................................ 104
Ohta, Jun ..................................................................................... 74
Piti-alongkorn, Preeti ..................................................................... 104
Rasmussen, Edie ............................................................................ 46
Rowland, Fytton ............................................................................ 47
Sakaguichi, Tetsuo .......................................................................... 74
Shibata, Youichi ............................................................................. 23
Shibayama, Mamoru ................................................. ·••.•·· ................. 64
Stewart, Darin ............................................................................ 46
Sugimoto, Shigeo .......................................................................... 74
Tabata, Koichi .............................................................................. 74
Thanyasiri, Thanussak .................................................................. 104
Weibel Struart .............................................................................. 71
Wuwongse, Vilas .......................................................................... 82
Yamamoto, Nobuhito ........................................................................ 1

106

KEYWORD INDEX
academic paper datab~e .................................................................. 94
automatic extraction of thesaurus ......................................................... 94
bilingual corpus .......................................................................... 94
computer network ............................................................................ 1
computer technology ........................................................................ 1
cross-lingual information retrieval ........................................................ 94
DC-based union cataloging system ...................................................... 73
declarative programs ..................................................................... 82
digital library ............................................................... 1,40,46,73,104
digital object repository ................................................................... .46
electronic journal ........................................................................ 40, 47
electronic library service ......................... , ....................................... .40
electronic library ............................................................................ 40
electronic publishing ..................................................................... 4 7
extensible markup language ............................................................ 23
GEM metadata standard ................................................................. 46
graph theory .................................................................................. 94
HTMI, ....................................................................................... 6
HTTP ........................................................................................ 6
K-12 educator ............................................................................... 46
microfilm image database ................................................................ 64
microfilm retrieval system ................................................................. 64
multilingual document browsing .......................................................... 7 4
multilingual texts display and input ....................................................... 74
multimedia .................................................................................. 64
natural language processing ............................................................ 104
off-the-shelf WWW browsers ............................................................. 74
online academic journal .................................................................. 73
online journal ................................................................................ 40
RDF .......................................................................................... 71
RDF elements ............................................................................... 82
resource discovery problems .............................................................. 82
scholarly communication .................................................................. 47
scholarly journal .......................................................................... 47
scholarly publishing ......................................................................... 47
SGMI, .......................................................................................... 6
text retrieval in multiple scripts ........................................................... 7 4

URL ........................................................................................... 6Wor~d Wide Web ............................................................................. 6
x:LL .......................................................................................... 23
XJ\.11., ...................................................................................... 23, 71
XSL ........................................................................................ 23
Z39.50 standard ............................................................................ 7J

107

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