Building the Interspace: The Illinois Digital Library Project
To appear in CACM (Communication of the Association for Computing Machinery),
April 1995 special issue of Digital Libraries
The University of Illinois is building a large-scale digital library testbed,
planned to grow to thousands of users and thousands of documents, with the goal
of bringing professional quality search and display to Internet information
services. Concurrently, research is designing and implementing a prototype of
the Interspace, a vision of what the Internet will evolve into, where the
distributed network of interconnected machines is replaced by a distributed
space of interlinked information.
The testbed collection consists of articles from engineering and science
journals and magazines, obtained in SGML format directly from major partners in
the publishing industry. This collection will be managed by the University
Library on a production basis, growing into a standard service of the new
Grainger Engineering Library Information Center.
The testbed software will support comprehensive search and display of complete
contents of articles, including text, figures, equations, and tables. The
software is based on NCSA Mosaic as a multi-platform World-Wide Web connection
to commercial software, currently SoftQuad Panorama for SGML display and
Dataware BRS for fulltext search.
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is developing a custom
version of their Mosaic for this testbed with sufficient client and server
interfaces and gateways (e.g. CCI and Z39.50) to bring professional display and
search to widely deployed Internet information services.
The testbed users will be faculty and students at the University of Illinois
initially, then spread to the CIC consortium (Big Ten universities).
The user evaluation will interview hundreds of users in focus groups to provide
detailed cognitive descriptions of needs and uses, plus survey thousands for a
grosser statistical picture. The software will also be instrumented to learn
how to deduce more detailed ethnographic information from large-scale network
usage.
The technology research efforts are centered around scale and functionality,
and will migrate into the testbed as they prove effective. Providing semantic
retrieval at a deeper level than commercial search is necessary to support
wide ranges of users across wide ranges of collections.
The utility of physical library classifications for networked digital
collections is being investigated by experimenting with interfaces using major
classification schemes (e.g. Dewey Decimal, Library Congress, INSPEC
thesaurus). A complementary effort is to generate classifications
automatically. This will be tested using a concept space approach based on
co-occurrence matrices, which has proven effective in specific domains such as
molecular biology.
The research efforts will be assembled into a next generation system based on a
new architecture for the Interspace. This will provide an environment for an
information space of structured objects across the network. Such an
environment will enable information sources and services (data and programs) to
be plugged into the space, while supporting interactive functionality. For
example, a user could execute an equation from an article while browsing or
record a navigation path through the collection to share with others. Support
of analysis and communication for programs and people will provide a new level
of functionality for network information systems. For more information see:
http://www.grainger.uiuc.edu/dli
Building the Interspace: The Illinois Digital Library Project (University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
The University of Illinois is building a large-scale digital library testbed,
which will make research-oriented information collections available via robust,
state-of-the-art full-text search and retrieval database technologies accessed
through intelligent multimedia interfaces. This testbed of online journals,
obtained from professional society and commercial publishers, will be
accessible online via TCP/IP networks to an academic community of thousands of
potential users. Over the course of the project, the usability, accessibility,
and value of the testbed documents will be enhanced through the use of such
techniques as interactive linking between documents, semantic retrieval
algorithms, dynamic document annotations, etc. Throughout the project, ongoing
research into the technology and sociology of the testbed and how it is used
will provide a better understanding of the dynamics, economics, and potential
benefits of future Digital Libraries and a clearer picture of how such systems
may evolve and scale to become major components of the National Information
Infrastructure.
The testbed collection will consist of articles from engineering and science
journals and magazines, obtained in SGML format directly from major partners in
the publishing industry. Current committed partners include: IEEE Computer
Society, APS (American Physical Society), AIAA (American Institute of
Aeronautics and Astronautics), ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineering),
IOP (Institute of Physics), and John Wiley & Sons. This collection will be
managed by the University Library on a production basis, growing into a
standard service of the new Grainger Engineering Library Information Center. A
prototype client-server database and interface will be developed and tested for
the Windows environment. From this prototype, a customized version of the
NCSA Mosaic software will be developed at the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications, building on and utilizing related state-of-the-art
software development work being done by corporate partners including SoftQuad,
Spyglass, and Microsoft.
Research, based in the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and
Information Science and involving researchers from the MIS department of the
University of Arizona and elsewhere, will encompass sociological evaluation of
the testbed and prototype design of future scaleable information systems. The
end-result of this collaboration will be a blueprint for advanced interactive
library and information retrieval systems which will help future researchers
exploit the 'Interspace', a distributed space of interlinked information. The
Interspace, an environment of structured objects across the network, will
enable disparate component data and programs to be dynamically plugged into
the space while maintaining interactive functionality.
For more information see:
http://www.grainger.uiuc.edu/dli
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