Information visualisation workshop

Visual modelling and the Web: conceptual browsing with Conzilla (Mikael Nilsson, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden)

Conzilla is the first incarnation of the idea of a "conceptual browser". A conceptual browser presents the conceptual relationships between a set of concepts in the form of surfable "concept maps", and allows the surfer to, separately, engage in content describing these concepts. Concept maps are visually similar to UML diagrams, or more general mind-maps, but adds "browsing" capabilities in the form of hyperlinks to other maps as well as content links, linking any type of textual or multimedial content. This results in a clear separation between the context and the content of the presented material, something that is missing in today's web environment. It can also be seen as a form of meta-data oriented browser, as all objects in the system are marked up using IMS conforming meta-data.

Conzilla is being developed at CID, Center for user oriented Information technology Design at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, where it takes part of an interdisciplinary initiative in the field of interactive learning environments.

e-mail: [e-mail]
URL: http://cid.nada.kth.se/il/conzilla

RSS 1.0 and its taxonomy module: bringing metadata back into RSS (Eric van der Vlist, DYOMEDEA)

"RSS ("RDF Site Summary") is a lightweight multipurpose extensible metadata description and syndication format. RSS is an XML application, conforms to the W3C's RDF Specification and is extensible via XML-namespace and/or RDF based modularization."

RSS 0.9 was introduced in 1999 by Netscape and has been one of the first RDF vocabularies to be widely adopted. This format has rapidly given birth to RSS 0.91 introducing many application specific features but losing its RDF nature.

RSS 1.0 is a proposal to come back to RSS roots --by reintroducing RDF-- and to define a namespace based modular structure. The proposed modules include modules to embed metadata using the Dublin Core syntax.

Amongst the other points to highlight: the attempt to keep a coherent dual view on the object models for both XML and RDF parsers and an experimental implementation of a taxonomy module assigning RDF resources to DC subjects.

See also:

http://purl.org/rss/1.0

http://www.egroups.com/files/rss-dev/Modules/Proposed/mod_taxonomy.html

http://4xt.org/news/000919-0001.xml

e-mail: [e-mail]
URL: http://www.dyomedea.com/english/vdv or http://xmlfr.org

Written contributions

Ontology based access to digital libraries (Sonia Bergamaschi, DSI - Universita di Modena e Reggio-Emilia, Fausto Rabitti, CNUCE-CNR)

The Internet is making accessible a large, and increasing, number of Digital Libraries, originally intended for specific and specialised groups of users, to a wide range of potential users. The problem of controlling, exchanging and integrating the semantics associated to Digital Libraries (i.e., the associated metadata) is becoming more and more important.

This need has been stressed by several initiatives. For example, the Open Archives initiative (OAi), in US, aims at guaranteeing interoperability among Digital Libraries (e-print archives). It has established a set of relatively simple but potentially quite powerful interoperability specifications that facilitate the development of services implemented by third parties.

Metadata in Digital Libraries, for bibliographic data, are usually expressed according to models like Dublin Core or MARC. However, there is the need to generalise the description of data and metadata made available in a large variety of Digital Libraries. The wide acceptance on the Web of XML can be a decisive factor in this direction.

XML, a standard proposed by W3C, is a mark-up language intended to make the information as self-describing, separating the function of document structural description and document presentation. The document tags can be use to describe the meaning of the document components. Controlling the semantic associated to XML tags will be a decisive task. This will open new perspective in accessing Digital Libraries, since XML is going to become the new interoperability standard for distributed Digital Libraries. We foresee a situation where XML will be used both for exchanging digital (often multimedia) documents and their multi-modal presentations (via XSL), and for defining their metadata, using XML DTD or Schema descriptions, with associated RDF (Resource Description Framework) schema descriptions.

For this purpose, we propose an ontology-based approach which aims to build a Digital Library Ontology representing a global virtual view of distributed Digital Libraries and defining mapping rules between local and global views: this mapping will be obtained by building a “Common Thesaurus” of intensional and extensional intra and inter-schema relationships able to reconcile different representation of similar concepts. The starting point is the MOMIS system (Mediating system environment fOr Multiple Information Sources) (see: sparc20.dsi.unimo.it), whose prototype has been recently presented at the VLDB 2000 conference.

e-mail: [e-mail]

URL: http://www.dsi.unimo.it/staff/st12/Bergamaschi.idc

XCC - eXtensible Computation Context (Antonio Capani, Explo-IT Research)

XCC consists of a methodology and a set of tools which act as Integration Technology (or middleware) between Mathematical Systems and other Systems (e.g.: tools for doing education, or business systems).

XCC proposes a new (meta)language (XCL, eXtensible Computation Language) for communicating not only data, but also programs.The syntax of XCL is based on the XML language. The semantics of XCL is given in a declarative way and is "plugged" to each program during its execution.

XCL is at a low level but it is human readable (because it is based on XML). So programs may extend XCL and apply semantics to it even before designing a high level language. This is really useful for teams like the CoCoA Team in which the research is oriented to the mathematics rather than the computer science aspects. Other people may develop and maintain the high level language and the parser for converting it in XCL.

XCL proposes a unified approach for denoting data, programs, and documents. A tight integration of XCL with the XSL language (for mapping XML into HTML or other languages) will permit to implement, within a unified framework, "active documents", that is documents containing formulas which may be executed within the document itself. The XCL language is protocol independent and so multiple protocols may be used, (e.g.: OpenMath, MathML).

An application of XCC (called CoCo) is in progress for the new major release of the CoCoA System in collaboration with the CoCoA Team (http://cocoa.dima.unige.it ) led by Prof. Lorenzo Robbiano of the University of Genova.

e-mail: [e-mail]

URL: http://www.Explo-IT.com