Navigation
Syndicate
Invitation
In 2002, the Polish government initiated the creation of a national digital library that would deliver cultural heritage to each house-hold through the Internet. At that time I was focusing my research on information retrieval supported by the upcoming technologies of the Semantic Web. It was prof. Henryk Krawczyk from Gdansk University of Technology that helped me align my research with the growing demand on digital library management systems. As a result, my Master's Thesis presented research and a prototype of a semantic digital library called Elvis-DL.
Two years later, I got invited by prof. Stefan Decker to continue and expand my research on semantic digital libraries in the newly setup Digital Enterprise Research Institute in Galway, Ireland; soon after Elvis-DL became JeromeDL and opened a new chapter of my research on semantic digital libraries. Two years ago, after the first Tutorial on Semantic Digital Libraries we gave at JCDL 2006, I met Bill and we started implementing the semantic digital libraries vision, and JeromeDL in particular, in the context of Learning. The project got even more momentum when my team was recently re-joined by Mariusz Cygan, who became the main architect and developer of JeromeDL.
Along the way I collaborated with many people who influenced and helped to put the domain of semantic digital libraries into shape; to mention only a few who's help I appreciate the most: prof. Daniel Schwabe, Bernhard Haslhofer, Predrag Knezevic, Sandy Payette, Dean Kraftt, and Traugott Koch.
For me my adventures in electronic libraries began in the 1970’s working in the UK with, and extending the capabilities of, IBM mainframe libraries used for source code storage and DataPoint minicomputer full text indexing methods. After returning to the US, in the early 1980’s I built electronic libraries and full text index access methods using VSAM under a variety of mainframe operating systems. These libraries were used in commercial software application products where it was a requirement to store documents coded in IBM GML and in high speed printer data streams for intelligent document assembly systems. My second generation design included links to other documents and metadata tags attached to the documents for search purposes.
Throughout the 1990’s I worked with unstructured data in the form of documents coded for composition, then ultimately encoded in Adobe Acrobat PDF. This work emphasized for me the value of tagged databases, interdocument linking, and the possibilities of hyperlinking text elements. But the new computing systems, PCs, had no good library support for managing such document collections, for indexing the text, or for searching intelligently for related and interlinked documents.
In 1999 I became aware of the Semantic web, did some experiments of my own and turned to building initial semantically powered products. But the web did not have a structure for the easy tagging of documents, HTML was too limiting and XML was just getting started. Semantics needed more time to mature.
By the early 2000’s, when I joined Adobe, the chicken and egg problem of metadata acquisition was obvious and I spent much of my time there working on building an automatic metadata entity extraction system while researching the possibilities of semantically powered systems.
Joining DERI in 2006, I met Sebastian and learned of JeromeDL, the semantic digital library project here. In my capacity as eLearning project executive I have been able to watch as semantic digital libraries have emerged and the underlying challenges been met . At the same time, the potential of libraries which could interlink documents, books, users, and other entities on a semantic level, interoperating with a multitude of other systems, has become apparent.
This book is a fascinating collection of papers about those possibilities, the work already completed, and the things to come.
For me it is the chance to watch a long term vision of documents and their intricate potential become more fully realized. I hope every one of our readers takes away as much insight from these chapters as I have gained by helping to gather and edit them.
