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By Monica Bonett - October 2001
The 5th conference in the series of European Conferences on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries was held in Darmstadt, Germany between 4 and 9 September 2001. Monica Bonett attended on behalf of the IMesh Toolkit Project, and reports on some of the activities.
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The first day offered a number of tutorials, followed by three days of presentations and panels. Workshops were held on the last two days. A number of posters and demonstrations were also presented.
In the first invited talk, "Digital Libraries - Panacea or Recreational Chemical", Mike Keller of Stanford University reflected on the feats and failures of the Internet in transforming the Information Age. Keller charted the rise, trajectory and fall of the dot.coms, attributing their fate to 3 fallacies on which dot.coms were built: early innovators will predominate, consumers' behaviour will change rapidly, and faulty business models. Drawing parallels between the economic and the digital library worlds, Keller asked whether digital libraries are surfing on the now-defunct dot.com wave. He made a graphic comparison of the Web's present state of organisation, as he sees it. If the Web is compared to a mound of rubbish, then the tools currently in use (search engines) operate with the precision and sensitivity of a tractor sifting through the mound.
On Thursday, Eric Miller from the W3C delivered the second invited talk, "Digital Libraries and the Semantic Web". Miller first explained the goals of the Semantic Web, then gave an overview of Semantic Web activity at the W3C, followed by an outline of Semantic Web principles. An example of how the Resource Description Framework (RDF) was used to to automate the creation and maintenance of the W3C TR page was described. RDF is one of the enabling technologies proposed by the W3C for building the Semantic Web. Finally, the speaker voiced his belief that technical and social areas of overlap between digital libraries and the Semantic Web can be identfied, and memory organisations such as museums and archives, together with digital libraries can provide key foundations for supporting the Semantic Web. Slides for this presentation are available online [1].
The third invited speaker was Dr. Türkay of the Senckenberg Museum (Frankfurt). The talk provided a lucidly-explained example of the complexities of coping with changes in descriptive data over time. The application area being described was the classification of species. As new species are identified or known species are redefined, specimens may need to be reassigned to a different species. This gives rise to the requirement of keeping track of the date or period of specimen classification, since the interpretation of the statement Specimen A is of Species B is dependant on the time and/or context when the statement was made. The solutions considered in the talk were all database-driven; from my understanding, the above is exactly the kind of scenario in which RDF is expected to play a significant role, particularly for interoperability, and I would have liked to see some discussion on the suitability (or otherwise) of deploying RDF to tackle this problem.
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| In the ECDL 2001 presentations Hall |
One focus chosen for the conference theme was "the on-going convergence of libraries, archives, and museums into integrated digital information spaces on science, art, and history". In addition to the invited talk which dealt with museum data, other museum-related work featured in the programme included a presentation [2] on the production of museum exhibitions using different presentation styles. Using XSL-based technology, different exhibitions can be composed from the same set of digital artifacts, and presented according to user group. Different styles of exhibition can be provided for adults, children, experts, novices, high-bandwidth users and low-bandwith users.
However, an overall personal point of view is that the proposed theme was not actually tackled in the conference. The reason for this may be that, as the chairpersons themselves note in their introductory statement [3], "This process [of convergence] seems, important as it is, to be only at its beginning."
On the other hand, the applications of digital library systems and their integration into practical work, another focus proposed for the conference theme, was well represented. Anne Adams [4] presented a study undertaken to understand the social and organisational impacts of introducing digital libraries in the wards of a hospital. A prototype of a system to be developed in Singapore [5] was built to show how to organise resources relevant to a particular task. The task chosen for the prototype is that of preparing a Masters Dissertation at the school of Computer Engineering at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. The prototype focuses on a particular task to illustrate the task-oriented concept for information access. The use of collections and services to support student learning activities is being studied in the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype (ADEPT) Project. Two presentations [6], [7] related to this project were delivered, both of which had a strong user focus. Michael Khoo [8] gave an ethnographical viewpoint, reporting on his investigations into designers' and users' understandings of digital libraries, and the consequences of differences in their viewpoints for library design and development.
In this conference, the issue of preservation, whilst being identified as an urgent and challenging problem, was dealt with from two very different angles. Michael Day [9] of UKOLN reviewed recent developments in the use of preservation metadata for digital objects, stressing the role of organisational (and other non-technical) solutions, and providing several examples of projects on preservation metadata in libraries and beyond. A mathematical framework for analyzing the problem of preservation was proposed by Cheney et al. [10].
The conference was well-attended, with over 250 registrants, including several well known figures from the field of digital library research. In addition to the formal programme, several impromptu and informal meetings took place among participants, not least those arising from spontaneous discussions and friendships, made in a bierkeller whilst sampling some of the local fare. The proceedings [3] are published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series (2163) and are available online [11].
The IMesh Toolkit Project <http://www.imesh.org/toolkit/> is funded by JISC/NSF under the DLI2 initiative.
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Monica
Bonett
Software Developer, Research and Development
UKOLN
University of Bath
BATH
BA2 7AY
United Kingdom
M.Bonett@ukoln.ac.uk
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/>
Phone: +44 1225 826826
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For citation purposes:
Bonett, M. "5th European Conference, ECDL 2001: Research and Advanced Technology for Digitial Libraries", Cultivate Interactive, issue
5, 1 October 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/ecdl/>
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