Theoretical Foundations for Digital Libraries

In 1991, a group of researchers chose the term digital libraries to describe an emerging field of research, development, and practice. Since then, Virginia Tech has had funded research in this area, largely through its Digital Library Research Laboratory. This book is the first in a four book series that reports our key findings and current research investigations.Underlying this book series are six completed dissertations (Gonçalves, Kozievitch, Leidig, Murthy, Shen, Torres), eight dissertations underway, and many masters theses. These reflect our experience with a long string of prototype or production systems developed in the lab, such as CITIDEL, CODER, CTRnet, Ensemble, ETANA, ETD-db, MARIAN, and Open Digital Libraries. There are hundreds of related publications, presentations, tutorials, and reports. We have built upon that work so this book, and the others in the series, will address digital library related needs in many computer science, information science, and library science (e.g., LIS) courses, as well as the requirements of researchers, developers, and practitioners.Much of the early work in the digital library field struck a balance between addressing real-world needs, integrating methods from related areas, and advancing an ever-expanding research agenda. Our work has fit in with these trends, but simultaneously has been driven by a desire to provide a firm conceptual and formal basis for the field.Our aim has been to move from engineering to science. We claim that our 5S (Societies, Scenarios, Spaces, Structures, Streams) framework, discussed in publications dating back to at least 1998, provides a suitable basis. This book introduces 5S, and the key theoretical and formal aspects of the 5S framework.While the 5S framework may be used to describe many types of information systems, and is likely to have even broader utility and appeal, we focus here on digital libraries. Our view of digital libraries is broad, so further generalization should be straightforward.We have connected with related fields, including hypertext/hypermedia, information storage and retrieval, knowledge management, machine learning, multimedia, personal information management, and Web 2.0. Applications have included managing not only publications, but also archaeological information, educational resources, fish images, scientific datasets, and scientific experiments/ simulations.Table of Contents: Introduction / Exploration / Mathematical Preliminaries / Minimal Digital Library / Archaeological Digital Libraries / 5S Results: Lemmas, Proofs, and 5SSuite / Glossary / Bibliography / Authors' Biographies / Index

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. He received an M.S. in Computer Science in 1981 and a Ph.D. in 1983 from Cornell University. 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 the ACM Transactions 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. In 1987 Dr. Fox began to explore the idea of all students shifting to electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), and has worked in this area ever since. He led the establishment of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (operating informally starting in 1995, incorporated in May 2003). He serves as founder and Executive Director of NDLTD. He won its 1st Annual NDLTD Leadership Award in May 2004. Dr. Fox has been involved in a wide variety of professional service activities. He has chaired scores of conferences or workshops, and served on hundreds of program or conference committees. At present he serves on ten editorial boards. From 2010-2013 he was a member of the board of directors of the Computing Research Association (CRA; he was co-chair of its membership committee, as well as a member of CRA-E, its education committee). He chairs the steering committee of the ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. 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.Marcos Andre Goncalves is an Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department of the Universida de Federal de Minas Gerais(UFMG), Brazil. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science(CS) from Virginia Tech (2004), an M.S. in CS from State University of Campinas, Brazil (Unicamp,1997), and a B.S., also in Computer Science, from the Federal University of Ceara, Brazil (UFC, 1995). Professor Goncalves has served as referee on different journals (TOIS,TKDE, IP&M, Information Retrieval, Information Systems, etc.) and at several conferences (SIGIR, CIKM, JCDL, TPDL, etc.). His research interests include information retrieval, digital libraries, text classification and text mining in general, having published more than 150 refereed journal articles and conference papers in these areas. Marcos is currently an affiliate member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.Rao Shen received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Virginia Tech in 2006. Her advisor was Edward A. Fox. Her research interests include digital libraries, information retrieval, information visualization, and machine learning. She joined the Web search relevance team at Yahoo! in May 2006. She is working on problems related to federated search in Yahoo! Labs.