Digital libraries (DLs) have introduced new technologies, as well as leveraging, enhancing, and integrating related technologies, since the early 1990s. These efforts have been enriched through a formal approach, e.g., the 5S (Societies, Scenarios, Spaces, Structures, Streams) framework, which is discussed in two earlier volumes in this series. This volume should help advance work not only in DLs, but also in the WWW and other information systems.
Drawing upon four (Kozievitch, Murthy, Park, Yang) completed and three (Elsherbiny, Farag, Srinivasan) in-process dissertations, as well as the efforts of collaborating researchers and scores of related publications, presentations, tutorials, and reports, this book should advance the DL field with regard to at least six key technologies. By integrating surveys of the state-of-the-art, new research, connections with formalization, case studies, and exercises/projects, this book can serve as a computing or information science textbook. It can support studies in cyber-security, document management, hypertext/hypermedia, IR, knowledge management, LIS, multimedia, and machine learning.
Chapter 1, with a case study on fingerprint collections, focuses on complex (composite, compound) objects, connecting DL and related work on buckets, DCC, and OAI-ORE. Chapter 2, discussing annotations, as in hypertext/hypermedia, emphasizes parts of documents, including images as well as text, managing superimposed information. The SuperIDR system, and prototype efforts with Flickr, should motivate further development and standardization related to annotation, which would benefit all DL and WWW users. Chapter 3, on ontologies, explains how they help with browsing, query expansion, focused crawling, and classification. This chapter connects DLs with the Semantic Web, and uses CTRnet as an example. Chapter 4, on (hierarchical) classification, leverages LIS theory, as well as machine learning, and is important for DLs as well as the WWW. Chapter 5, on extraction from text, covers document segmentation, as well as how to construct a database from heterogeneous collections of references (from ETDs); i.e., converting strings to canonical forms. Chapter 6 surveys the security approaches used in information systems, and explains how those approaches can apply to digital libraries which are not fully open.
Given this rich content, those interested in DLs will be able to find solutions to key problems, using the right technologies and methods. We hope this book will help show how formal approaches can enhance the development of suitable technologies and how they can be better integrated with DLs and other information systems.
Author Biography:
Edward A. Fox grew up on Long Island, New York. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), receiving a B.S. in 1972 in Electrical Engineering, through the Computer Science option. His undergraduate adviser was J.C.R. Licklider and his thesis adviser was Michael Kessler. AtMIT he founded the ACMStudent Chapter and the Student Information Processing Board, receiving the William Stewart Award.
From 1971-1972 he worked as Data Processing Instructor at the Florence Darlington Technical College. From 1972-1978 he was Data Processing Manager at Vulcraft, a Division of NUCOR Corporation, also in Florence, SC. In the fall of 1978 he began his graduate studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, where his adviser was Gerard Salton. He received an M.S. in Computer Science in 1981 and a Ph.D. in 1983. From the summer of 1982 through the spring of 1983 he served as Manager of Information Systems at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, Ibadan, Nigeria. From the fall of 1983 through the present he has been on the faculty of the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech (also called VPI&SU or Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University). In 1988 he was given tenure and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor. In 1995 he was promoted to Professor.
Dr. Fox has been an IEEE Senior Member since 2004, an IEEE Member since 2002, an IEEE-CS Member since 2001, and a member of ACM since 1967. He was vice chairman of ACM SIGIR 1987-1991 and then chair 1991-1995. During that period, he helped launch the new ACM SIG on Multimedia. He served as a member of the ACM Publications Board 1988-1992 and as Editor-in-Chief of ACM Press Database and Electronic Products 1988-1991, during which time he helped conceive and launch the ACM Digital Library. He served 2000-2006 as a founder and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Journal of Education Resources In Computing (JERIC), which led to theACMTransactions on Education. Since 2013 he has been editor for Information Retrieval and Digital Libraries for the ACM Book Series. Over the period 2004-2008 he served as Chairman of the IEEE-CS Technical Committee on Digital Libraries, and continues to serve on its Executive Committee. Dr. Fox served 1995-2008 as Editor of the Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc. Series on Multimedia Information and Systems. Dr. Fox has been a member of Sigma Xi since the 1970s and a member of Upsilon Pi Epsilon since 1998.
Dr. Fox has been (co)PI on over 115 research and development projects. In addition to his courses at Virginia Tech, Dr. Fox has taught over 78 tutorials in more than 28 countries. His publications and presentations include: 17 books, 107 journal/magazine articles, 49 book chapters, 184 refereed (+40 other) conference/workshop papers, 61 posters, 66 keynote/banquet/international invited/distinguished speaker presentations, 38 demonstrations, and over 300 additional presentations. His research and teaching has been on digital libraries, information storage and retrieval, hypertext/hypermedia/multimedia, computing education, computational linguistics, and sub-areas of artificial intelligence.
