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IMA Workshop (Minneapolis – 8-9 December 2006)

“The Evolution of Mathematical Communicationin the Age of Digital Libraries”

Panel on Digital Libraries of Today

Moderator: Edward A. Fox

• Thierry Bouche

• Petr Sojka

• Philippe Tondeur

• Bernd Wegner

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Thierry Bouche

• Université de Grenoble I (France)• UFR de Mathématiques• Research focused on the study of hermitian

vector bundles over complex analytic manifolds, specifically their sections and cohomology.

• Another subject of interest is Arakelov theory such as developped by H. Gillet, Ch. Soulé or L. Szpiro: I have published with A. Abbes a new elementary and straightforward proof of the arithmetic Riemann-Roch theorem formerly due to Gillet and Soulé

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Petr Sojka

• MSc. (informatics) and Ph.D. (computational linguistics) from Masaryk university in Brno, Czech Republic, now assoc. professor.

• Member of Czech Digital Mathematics Library (DML-CZ) team responsible for the IT technologies chosen for the project (math OCR, formats, information retrieval and search issues).

• For more try first hit of "Petr Sojka" on Google.

• DML-CZ: http://dml.muni.cz/documents.html

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Philippe Tondeur• Retired 2002 as Director of Division of Mathematical Sciences at NSF. Previously, Chair of the

Department of Mathematics at U. Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Now, an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at UIUC (since 1968).

• Ph.D. degree in Mathematics from the U. Zurich in 1961. Then a Research Fellow and Lecturer at U. of Paris, Harvard, the U. of California at Berkeley and Wesleyan U.

• Over 100 research articles and monographs, incl. 9 books, mainly on differential geometry, esp. geometry of foliations and geometric applications of partial differential equations. Approx. 200 invited lectures.

• Current interests: mathematics and science research and education, library digitization, science policy, institutional governance and leadership development.

• Has been Visiting Professor at the Universities of Buenos Aires, Auckland (New Zealand), Heidelberg, Rome, Santiago de Compostela (Spain), Leuven (Belgium), as well as at the Eidgenoessische Technische Hochschule in Zurich, the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Keio U. in Tokyo and Tohoku U. in Sendai.

• Served as Editor and Managing Editor of the Illinois Journal of Mathematics.• Recipient of UIUC Award of Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, and a SIAM Public

Service Award. • Recently served on and chaired the Board of Governors of the Institute for Mathematics and its

Applications (IMA) at U. Minneapolis.• Served on the National Advisory Council of the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences

Institute (SAMSI) at the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina.• Member of the International Scientific Advisory Board of the Canadian Mathematics of

Information Technology and Complex Systems (MITACS) Centre of Excellence, and a Trustee of the prospective Instituto Madrileno de Estudios Avanzadas-MATH (IMDEA-MATH) in Madrid. Member of the U.S. National Committee on Mathematics of the National Research Council, and served as a member of the U.S. delegation to the ICM 2006. Member of the Science Policy Committee of SIAM, as well as of MAA.

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Bernd Wegner• Full Professor of Mathematics • Editor-in-chief of Zentralblatt MATH, the most comprehensive info service

in math, with Web access under EMIS (European Mathematical Information Service)

• Member of the advisory board for MATHDI, on education in mathematics • Scientific Coordinator of EMIS, math portal with an electronic library • Leader of the TU-group for the EULER-project, a prototype for an

integrated access to Web-based mathematical documents, transitioning to a regular Web service

• Scientific Director of the LIMES-project (Large Infrastructures in Mathematics - Enhanced Services) to transform Zentralblatt MATH into European cooperation with Web-based input structures

• Director of the ERAM-project (Electronic Research Archive in Mathematics), to build up a digital archive of classical mathematics, capturing the Jahrbuch ueber die Fortschritte

• Chairman of the Electronic Publishing Committee of EMS (European Mathematical Society), member of the Database Committee of EMS

• Associated with project Euclid (Cornell), establishing a non-profit (electronic) publication facility for mathematics

• Member of the board of IWI (Institute for Scientific Info, Osnabrueck) • Exploitation Manager of the European IST Project MOWGLI

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Fox: Related Grants• NSF Grant IRI-9116991: A User-Centered Database from the

Computer Science Literature, 9/15/91 - 2/28/95, PIs: E. Fox, D. Hix L. Heath.

• NSF CISE Institutional Infrastructure (Education) Grant CDA-9312611: Interactive Learning with a Digital Library in Computer Science, 8/15/93 – 7/31/97, PIs: E. Fox, J. Lee, C. Shaffer, H. Hartson, D. Barnette.

• U.S. Dept. of Education, FIPSE Program P116B61190: Improving Graduate Education with a National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, 9/1/96-8/31/99, PIs: E. Fox, J. Eaton, G. McMillan. Cost sharing: SURA, Microsoft, Adobe

• NSF DUE-0121679: Computing and Information Technology Interactive Digital Educational Library (CITIDEL), 9/1/2001 - 5/31/2005, PIs: Edward A. Fox. Co-PIs: JAN Lee, M. Perez-Quinones, L. Cassel (Villanova), C. Lee Giles (Penn State), J. Impagliazzo (Hofstra), D. Knox (College of NJ)

• NSF DUE-0532825: Personalization of Content: Bridging the gap between NSDL and its users through the course website, 9/1/2005 - 8/31/2008, PIs: M. Perez-Quinones, E. Fox, L. Cassel, W. Fan

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Fox: Related URLs

• Fox: http://fox.cs.vt.edu/• Digital Library Research Lab: www.dlib.vt.edu/• Networked Digital Library of Theses and

Dissertations: www.ndltd.org/• National Science Digital Library: http://nsdl.org/• PlanetMath: http://planetmath.org/

http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-09022003-150851/ - Aaron Krowne 2003 thesis: An Architecture for Collaborative Math and Science Digital Libraries,

• CITIDEL (NSDL CS collection): www.citidel.org/• NSF Education Innovation: http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~csei/

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5S: A Formal Model for Digital Libraries (see ACM TOIS April 2004)

Ss Examples Objectives

Streams Text; video; audio; image Describes properties of the DL content such as encoding and language for textual material or particular forms of multimedia data

Structures Collection; catalog; hypertext; document; metadata

Specifies organizational aspects of the DL content

Spaces Measure; measurable, topological, vector, probabilistic

Defines logical and presentational views of several DL components

Scenarios Searching, browsing, recommending

Details the behavior of DL services

Societies Service managers, learners, teachers, etc.

Defines managers, responsible for running DL services; actors, that use those services; and relationships among them

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Browsing Collaborating Customizing Filtering Providing access Recommending Requesting Searching Visualizing

Annotating Classifying Clustering Evaluating Extracting Indexing

Measuring Publicizing

Rating Reviewing (peer)

Surveying Translating

(language)

Conserving Converting

Copying/Replicating Emulating Renewing

Translating (format)

Acquiring Cataloging

Crawling (focused) Describing Digitizing

Federating Harvesting Purchasing Submitting

Preservational Creational

Add Value

Repository-Building

Information Satisfaction

Services

Infrastructure Services

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Information Life Cycle

AuthoringModifying

OrganizingIndexing

StoringRetrieving

DistributingNetworking

Retention/ Mining

AccessingFiltering

UsingCreating

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LOCKSS

• Lots of copies keep stuff safe• Stanford (Vicky Reich)• Solves preservation replication problem• Initial content: journals• Emory (Martin Halbert, Aaron Krowne)

– Help deploy and adapt– Help apply in other contexts

• NDLTD prototype for ETDs (electronic theses and dissertations)

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OAI - Open Archives Initiative

• Advocacy for interoperability

• Standard for transferring metadata among digital libraries– Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH)

• Simplicity• Generality• Extensibility

• Support for PMH => Open Archive (OA)

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DiscoveryCurrent

AwarenessPreservation

Service Providers

Data Providers

Metadata

harvestin

g

The World According to OAI

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For DL Information• Magazine: www.dlib.org• Conferences

– ECDL: www.ecdl2007.org– ICADL: www.icadl.org– JCDL: www.jcdl2007.org

• Associations– ASIS&T DL SIG: www.asis.org/SIG/sigdl/– IEEE TCDL: www.ieee-tcdl.org– ACM SIGIR: www.acm.org/sigs/sigir/

• NSF: www.dli2.nsf.gov• Curriculum: http://curric.dlib.vt.edu/

DL Challenges • Preservation - so people with trust DLs

• Scalability, sustainability, interoperability

• DL industry (in addition to Google, IBM, …)

– critical mass, covering libraries, archives, museums, corporate info, govt info, personal info - “quality WWW” integrating IR, HT, MM, ...

• Math and DLs (some dates)– 1987: ETDs– 1991: ACM DL– 2001: CITIDEL– 2003: PlanetMath

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Panel Intro

• Questions, questions, questions !!!• Please write notes and pass them to aisle and to front.• Please raise hand till I acknowledge you.• Please state name and affiliation, slowly.• Be brief as you ask a question.

• Theme: How does the state of the art in today's digital libraries compare with digital libraries in general?

• Challenge of supporting math content as we do: information retrieval, blogging, authoring, web display,…

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Initial Questions (Robert Miner) - 1

• Relative to your initial expectations, what are the areas where the digital math library projects you are associated with have been most successful? Least successful? How would you compare the success of digital math libraries to digital library projects of similar scope in other areas? Do you think that digital math libraries are currently viewed as successes by their users? By the larger library institutions of which they are a part?

• Do your users have expectations for digital libraries that you have a hard time meeting due to technological limitations in dealing with mathematical content? Conversely, are there areas where you are able to provide users with tools and services that take advantage of the mathematical nature of your content that aren't generally available in other digital libraries? Are the gaps in software support for mathematical content so severe that they limit the usefulness and popularity of digital math libraries, or is it mostly a question of mathematical content requiring extra time and effort in order to achieve adequate quality and ease-of-use for end users? Which software gaps are most serious for you, and how do you work around the problems now?

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Initial Questions (Robert Miner) - 2

• Do your users have expectations for digital libraries that you have a hard time meeting due to technological limitations in dealing with mathematical content? Conversely, are there areas where you are able to provide users with tools and services that take advantage of the mathematical nature of your content that aren't generally available in other digital libraries? Are the gaps in software support for mathematical content so severe that they limit the usefulness and popularity of digital math libraries, or is it mostly a question of mathematical content requiring extra time and effort in order to achieve adequate quality and ease-of-use for end users? Which software gaps are most serious for you, and how do you work around the problems now?

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Outline

• Introduction• What we need in DLs

for math content• What would be a

future version of something like Google Scholar, that does math right

• Key challenges:

Searching math

Browsing math

Capturing old math

Preserving math

Detailed linking

Personal- ization