Michael Spring, University of Pittsburgh
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Introduction
This is an analysis of the position papers prepared for the
NSF workshop on post digital library futures. It has been conducted
in parallel with the documents prepared by Ron Larsen. A comparison
of the analyses finds that they are generally in agreement.
This analysis develops a conceptual map of the issues identified
and proposes an assignment of participants to breakout groups
based on that mapping.
The diagram on the following page suggests a concept mapping
of the participant position papers for the NSF workshop. The
second diagram suggests several areas of this conceptual mapping
that might serve to focus discussions. The table following
the diagrams maps participant interests to the breakout groups.
The top three areas
of interest for each participant are predicted.
The diagram presented is based on a preliminary analysis of
the papers but makes no effort to catch all of the topics
or ideas presented in the papers. The diagram may be more understandable
if the following points are kept in mind:
- The most dominant theme either explicitly or implicitly
referenced in the papers is the development of semantics
for the management of large information stores. Thus, while
there
are numerous information management issues, semantics is
singled out for special treatment.
- Various papers explicitly addressed the development of
semantics (the creation problem) – how do we create
semantics or ontologies. Other authors talked about how the
resulting information could be used (the
use opportunities) given semantics in the information store.
Some papers addressed use explicitly and
others talked about provenance, archiving or knowledge generation.
A number of papers identified
important areas that they were not addressing in the information
life cycle. These various discussions led
us to include a section not only on creation but use. That
is, the issue of creating semantics and using
managed information begs the broader issue of information
life cycle or unit operations on information.
- A couple papers referenced significant attention to work
with images or the spoken word. This suggests
that there is implicit support for information stores of
symbolic information in digital form – text
documents, and explicit suggestions that important stores
of digital information of non-symbolic nature –
spoken words and images to be specific.
- There are a series of papers that address issues of infrastructure
and they appear to be broken down into
three categories – socio-political issues, technical
issues, and standardization issues.
A Conceptual Map of Participant Comments and Interests
This diagram suggests breakout groups as shown below:
Breakout Group Details
The potential breakout groups are briefly described below
by name, “advertising slogan”, description, and
potential
questions or issues.
- Semantics,( ), What are the issues, problems, and opportunities
for the development of semantics to guide
knowledge management. This would include:
- What are the techniques for bottom up and top down
generation of semantic information?
- How are various distributed ontologies related?
- Use,( ), What are the issues, problems, and opportunities
related to uses of the systems that might be created. That
is, how might they change finding information, using information,
creating information,
archiving information, etc.
- What is the information life cycle
- Is there a knowledge life cycle
- What are the unit operations on ontologies
- Non-Symbolic Information,( ), What are the issues, problems,
and opportunities for the development of better semantics
and processing of non-symbolic digital information?
- How should digitized analog sources be treated and
annotated?
- What needs to be done to further speech and image recognitions?
- Dynamic Information,( ), What are the issues, problems,
and opportunities for the development of new more dynamic
and intelligent forms of information - active documents,
agents services, etc.
- How will services impact the design of information
stores?
- What new semantics are required for services
- How will API’s impact the scope of efforts
- Technical Infrastructure,( ), What are the technical infrastructure
issues, problems, and opportunities that need to be addressed
to allow these structures to emerge?
- What standards are needed to support these activities.
- What forms of object, process, and artifact transparency
will be required?
- Cultural Infrastructure,( ), What are the cultural and
political issues, problems, and opportunities that need to
be addressed to allow these structures to emerge?
- How will intellectual property management impact the
system?
- How will new behaviors be transferred?
- What kinds of business process reengineering are required?
- Interfaces,( ), what are the kinds of interfaces and interactive
systems required to make optimal use of
these systems?
- What new kinds of interfaces will be needed for personal
portals
- What kinds of visualization and augmentation tools
will be required?
- How will systems be assessed?
- Middleware ,( ), What is the nature of the glue required
to make construction and operation of distributed
information systems possible.
- What services will be defined as core?
- How will services be found?
- What services will be standardized?
Participant Assignment
The following table suggests priority groups for the participants.
This analysis was conducted as a preliminary test of this system.
The assumption is that participants will self select a breakout
group or suggest another group. Assuming this analysis is correct,
there would be 5 breakout groups, indicated by the columns
with the grey cells in them.
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