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Digital Libraries (1996-2000)

Digital Libraries

Our work on digital libraries started in 1996 and has provided several prototype implementations that are available on the Web and are in intensive every-day use. 1996/97 our work was funded by the BMBF within the German digital library project MeDoc, 1998/99 within a HSP3 project.
 

Activities and implementations:

  • In a  recent evaluation we found that current object-relational DBMS still lack major features and/or suffer from performance problems w.r.t. supporting information retrieval functions (vague queries, ranking, etc.).
  • In 1998/99, we developed and brought online the first version of the document server DOL of the University of Leipzig. It comprises a central repository for all kinds of fulltext documents from all institutes and faculties of the university. In particular it serves as a central access point to research results from the University of Leipzig as described in Ph.D. theses, habilitation theses, master theses, preprints, working papers, etc. Inclusion of new documents is made easy over a Web interface and requires a signed copyright statement of the authors. All documents are available in several formats (HTML, PDF, Postscript) and searchable in a flexible way. In particular, fulltext and catalog searches are supported.  A flexible navigation interface is provided allowing access along five dimensions (organization, document type, year of publication, language, subject area). Each document is assigned a stable URL that can be used in publication lists of the authors, institutes, etc.

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  • We developed a general object-oriented database model for managing and representing highly structured collections of multimedia objects and documents. This model allows the effective management of museum exposures, product catalogues, etc. as well as their internet representation in a variety of multimedia formats and languages.  A prototype implementation has been performed based on the object-oriented DBMS O2 and for representing the Museum of Musical Instruments of the University of Leipzig. (Please keep in mind that this is not the official presentation of this museum, which has the URL http://mfm.uni-leipzig.de.)
  • The goal of the MeDoc project (Multimedial documents, MeDoc homepage, local MeDoc page) was the design, implementation and evaluation of full-text information and publication services in the field of computer science. More than 25 universities and institutes  participated in this project which run until Dec. 1997. Several dozens of computer science textbooks and numerous  journals and technical reports have been brought online within several fulltext database servers, including a server in our department in Leipzig (the only one in East Germany). In the winter of 1996/97, our group has converted the textbook Mehrrechner-Datenbanksysteme (Principles of distributed and parallel databases) to HTML and included into the MeDoc library.

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  • Since 1997, we use an object-oriented database for maintaining the current directory of lectures (with detailed descriptions of lectures). The documents are stored in SGML format from which various presentation formats can be derived. Recently, a more powerful XML-based system called ISLE has been developed that is based on a distributed multi-server architecture. It can be used for the management of arbitrary online documents created by several authors. While the prototype implementation is running, the current lack of XML editing tools make it difficult to use for non-experts.

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  • Since 1996, we provide WWW access to the catalog of our computers science library that is replicated in a relational database. The database also contains the full texts of our research reports which thus can be obtained as the result of a search query. Furthermore, query results contain links to the home pages of authors and of publishers.

Publications

Master Theses:
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