6th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for
Digital Libraries September 16-18, 2002 - Pontifical Gregorian
University, Rome, Italy

http://www.ecdl2002.org/

participants +/- 150
CWI attendees: Suzanne Little, Joost Geurts

presented: "Dynamic Generation of Intelligent Multimedia Presentations
Through Semantic Inferencing" by Suzanne

conclusion: DL (Digital Libraries) is a broad field with lots of different
people ranging from database experts to HCI and librarians. Main focus of
this conference was on architecture and search and not so much on
presentation. People were interested in the talk and the ideas though but
couldn't really relate it to their own work so we didn't get a lot of
useful comments.

What surprised me the most was the absence of semantic web interest.
Especially in DLs, where there are a number of more or less established
meta-data standards and interoperability and accessibility becomes more
of an issue, I had expected it to be a more important topic. When I asked
people their opinion on the semantic web, and why nobody was talking about
it, they were in general skeptical about the fact that they would have to
adopt another standard. Moreover they don't see any advantages in it yet
since people aren't very interested in making their collection available
to machines. So, in conclusion before they start thinking about it they
want to see examples, and know the exact consequences of using this
technology.

Another remarkable point I found is the fact that the field is
dominated by Americans, on the European conference on DLs, the panel
discussing DL development consisted of merely Americans. Reason for
that apparently is the fact that DL research is highly funded by the
American Government. So as it is now, cutting edge DL research is done
in America and Europe is being dragged along.


16 sept Hector Garcia-Molina (Stanford University) - keynote -
"WebBase: Web capture and distribution"

Developed a www crawler which finds documents which match a user
specified 'handler'. Handlers are rules written by users which extract
relevant data from a page, and decide, based on that, whether a page is
'interesting'.

Davide Bolchini (University of Milano)
"Goal-Oriented requirements specification for DL"

Architecture schema for "MAO"-like negotiations between different goals
in DL. Traceability I found the most interesting one which basically
states that you should be able to trace all the choices made to verify
they were correct.

Jon Hegglan (University of Science and technology)
"OntoLog: Temporal Annotation Using Ad hoc ontologies and application profiles"
Tool for annotating temporal media

Marcos Andre Goncalves (Virgina tech)
"An XML Log standard and tool for DL logging analysis"
XML logging format for web servers in order to analyze and compare content access.

Carlo Meghini (Instituto tecnologie e science dell informazione..,
pisa) 

"Foundations of a Multidimensional Query langa for DL" 
Basic Query language for querying DL documents. Didn't quite understand
why an XML query languages doesn't suffice.


Jin-Cheon Na (Texas University) "Employing smart browsers to support
flexible information presentation in petri net-based DL's"

A presentation front end for an Information sever based on petri
nets. Petri nets describe navigation structures through the
content. The resulting documents where adapted for different browsers
(pda, windows, Linux)


D.Blocks (university of Glamorgan) 
"Qualitative evaluation of thesaurus based retrieval" 

Search tool which embedded a thesaurus. User
studies proved that a thesaurus is a useful addition to a keyword
based search engine. People couldn't find what they want by only using a thesaurus.

Kalina Bontcheva (University of Sheffield)
"Using Human language technology for automatic annotation and indexing of DL content"

Tool which uses Natural Language technology to automatically annotate
textual documents in DL's