Browsing by Author "Tuohy, Conal"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4

Restricted
Ambient Findability and Structured Serendipity: Enhanced Resource Discovery for Full Text Collections
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2008) Stevenson, Alison; Tuohy, Conal; Norrish, Jamie
University Libraries manage increasingly large collections of full text digital resources. These might be repositories of born digital research outputs, e-reserves collections or online libraries of material digitised to provide open access to significant texts. Whatever the content of the material, the structured data of full text resources can be exploited to enhance research discovery. The implicit connections and cross-references between books and papers, which occur in all print collections, can be made explicit in a collection of electronic texts. Correctly encoded and exposed they create a framework to support resource discovery and navigation both within and between texts by following links between topics. Using this approach the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre (NZETC) at Victoria University of Wellington has developed a delivery system for its growing online digital library using the ISO Topic Map technology. Like a simple back-of-book index or a library classification system, a topic map aggregates information to provide binding points from which everything that is known about a given subject can be reached. Topics in the NZETC digital library represent authors and publishers, texts, and images, as well as people and places mentioned or depicted in those texts and images. Importantly, the Topic Map extends beyond the NZETC collection to incorporate relevant external resources which expose structured metadata about their collection. Innovative entity authority records management enables, for example, the topic page for William Colenso to automatically provide access not only to the full text of his works in the NZETC collection but out to another book-length work in the Auckland University’s “Early NZ Books Collection” and to several essays in the National Library’s archive of the Royal Society Journals. It also enables links to externally provided services providing information on Library holdings of print copies of the text. The NZETC system is based on international standards for the representation and interchange of knowledge including TEI XML, XTM, XSL and the CIDOC CRM. The NZETC collection currently includes over 2500 texts covering 110,000 topics.
Open Access
Generating the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand website, using XSLT running on a Condor grid
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2007) Tuohy, Conal
This is a report on an experimental NZETC project to speed up the automated regeneration of a large website by using VUW's Condor computing grid. The aim of the project was to investigate the feasibility of using the grid as a platform for website generation. The project did not extend to generating the entire website, though it did produce the bulk of it, and did successfully demonstrate the feasibility of using the grid for similar work in future. The grid-based application has shown the grid to be a good platform for generating large websites from XML source materials. The application was able to generate around 80 thousand web pages in about 4 hours, making it many times quicker than a system based on a single computer. The project also highlighted a few technical issues with the Condor grid, relating to the use of file folders in grid jobs; prioritisation of grid nodes based on the opening hours of the computer labs; and the special configuration of computers running Microsoft Windows.
Open Access
Going Beyond Google: Representation and Retrieval of Information Using Topic Maps
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2006) Stevenson, Alison; Darwin, Jason; Tuohy, Conal
Library collections include increasingly large amounts of digital material. Libraries are digitising parts of their collection to provide wider access to important resources, and born-digital material is being added to collections. Basic text string searching and linear chapter-by-chapter browsing functionality is usually provided but so much more is possible. The implicit linkages and cross-references between books, which occur in all print collections, can be made explicit in a collection of electronic texts. Correctly encoded, they create a framework to provide users with the ability to move horizontally between books and collections by following links between topics. Using this approach the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre (NZETC) has explored and developed an improved means of navigation for its growing online digital library using Topic Map technology. Like a simple back-of book index or a library classification system, a topic map aggregates information to provide binding points from which everything that is known about a given subject can be reached.
Open Access
Topic Maps and TEI - Using Topic Maps as a Tool for Presenting TEI Documents
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2007) Tuohy, Conal
This paper describes a method used by the website of the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre (NZETC), in which Topic Maps are used as a tool for presenting TEI-encoded texts in HTML form. Many electronic text archives transform their TEI texts into HTML for publishing their texts on the World Wide Web. Typically each chapter or page is transformed from TEI into a separate web page. Such a method produces websites that have the same structure as a physical book. However, TEI is more expressive than HTML and can encode many other features of interest than just chapters, pages, and paragraphs. For example, TEI is also used to encode information about people and places and events, as well as literary criticism, and linguistic analysis. Indeed, TEI is designed to be extended to suit all kinds of scholarly needs. These more complex aspects of text encoding are more difficult to transform into HTML. Because TEI is designed to be convenient for scholars to encode complex information, rather than for readers to understand it, it is necessary to transform the TEI into another form suitable for display. For instance, where a TEI corpus includes references to people, these references might be collated together to produce an index. For practical purposes, it is often necessary to extract information from TEI into a database, so that it can be queried conveniently and transformed into a web site. The new "Topic Map" standard of the International Standards Organisation is identified as a suitable technology for solving this problem. A topic map is a kind of Web database with an extremely flexible structure. This paper describes a framework for using TEI in conjunction with Topic Maps to produce a large website which can be navigated easily in many directions.