| Homepage Reginald Ferber |
Projects & Areas of Interest | |||||||
|
[ BACK ]
[ NEXT ]
|
Digital LibrariesThe growth of the web in the 1990th and its use for the publication of scientific results lead to the concept of a digital library as a cheap and ubiquitous access to knowledge and data. New Potentials - New ChallengesNew technical developments opened options for new services - like very fast publication, communication with authors, and personalized access or publication in other formats than print (like video, demonstrators or "active" examples). But soon it became clear that these options pulled in a bunch of new problems and challenges as well - technical problems, but as well organizational and economical ones. A rather basic one is the apropriate definition of the "objects" a digital library should handle. An early proposal was the notion of a "document like object" as used in the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative ( DCMI), that just left this question open.Structuring Knowledge in Distributed CollectionsInformation Retrieval is of course central to the development of a digital library. New problems arise if the "collection" of the library is distributed over various locations (or servers) or if the "documents" have to be retrieved out of a much larger set of objects like on the web. Methods to approach these problems are the use of metadata descriptions of "resources" or "objects" using specifications like Dublin Core or LOM or syntax specifications like RDF. Other approaches are Data Mining Methods that can use the content of web pages, their structure and markup, or the link structure and anchor texts between web pages. In a global perspective all these approaches can be seen as attempts to construct representations of knowledge that are useful for humans and machines. International Co-operations and ProjectsDuring my work at GMD in Darmstadt I have participated in the setup of the digital library department (delite) and have been responsible for GMDs NCSTRL server and its further development within the EU-funded Delos and ETRDL initiatives. Further I have been involved in the Multiple Languages working group of the Dublin Core Initiative. I have co-ordinated several project proposals for GMD and the Darmstadt University of Technology to national and European funding programs, in particular the Global Info Program of the German Ministry of Science and Technology. |
|||||||