The Digital Library universe is a complex framework. The growth and evolution of this framework in terms of approaches, solutions and systems has led to the need for common foundations capable of setting the basis for better understanding, communicating and stimulating further evolution in this area. The DELOS Digital Library Reference Model aims at contributing to the creation of such foundations. It exploits the collective understanding on Digital Libraries that has been acquired by European research groups active in the Digital Library field for many years, both within the DELOS Network of Excellence and beyond, as well as by other groups around the world. It identifies the set of concepts and relationships that characterise the essence of the Digital Library universe. This model should be considered as a roadmap allowing the various players involved in the Digital Library domain to follow the same route and share a common understanding in dealing with the entities of such a universe. This volume presents the DELOS Reference Model by introducing the principles governing it as well as the set of concepts and relationships that collectively capture the intrinsic nature of the various entities of the Digital Library universe. Because of the broad coverage of the Digital Library universe, its evolving nature, and the lack of any previous agreement on its foundations, the Reference Model is by necessity a dynamic framework, as is also this document. Continuous evolutions of the document are envisaged in order to obtain a number of well-formed and consolidated definitions, shared by the Digital Library community.

The Delos digital library reference model : foundations for digital libraries

This article is a study of the themes and issues concerning the annotation of digital contents, such as textual documents, images, and multimedia documents in general. These digital contents are automatically managed by different kinds of digital library management systems and more generally by different kinds of information management systems.Even though this topic has already been partially studied by other researchers, the previous research work on annotations has left many open issues. These issues concern the lack of clarity about what an annotation is, what its features are, and how it is used. These issues are mainly due to the fact that models and systems for annotations have only been developed for specific purposes. As a result, there is only a fragmentary picture of the annotation and its management, and this is tied to specific contexts of use and lacks-general validity.The aim of the article is to provide a unified and integrated picture of the annotation, ranging from defining what an annotation is to providing a formal model. The key ideas of the model are: the distinction between the meaning and the sign of the annotation, which represent the semantics and the materialization of an annotation, respectively; the clear formalization of the temporal dimension involved with annotations; and the introduction of a distributed hypertext between digital contents and annotations. Therefore, the proposed formal model captures both syntactic and semantic aspects of the annotations. Furthermore, it is built on previously existing models and may be seen as an extension of them.

A formal model of annotations of digital content

This paper presents a literature review of empirical research related to the use and effect of online social annotation (SA) tools in higher education settings. SA technology is an emerging educational technology that has not yet been extensively used and examined in education. As such, the research focusing on this technology is still very limited. The literature review has aimed at presenting a comprehensive list of SA empirical studies not limited to a particular research method or study domain. Out of more than 90 articles that were initially found, only 16 studies met the inclusion criteria. Among the included studies were eight experimental or quasi-experimental studies and eight evaluation/survey studies. The SA empirical research has provided some evidence regarding the potential effectiveness of integrating social annotation tools into learning activities. Findings from the gathered literature were synthesized to provide recommendations for using SA technology in educational settings.

The Educational Use of Social Annotation Tools in Higher Education: A Literature Review.

Automatically and repeatedly crawling multiple multimedia websites to identify and collect information about the multimedia content that is available for delivery over the Internet to a client device for playback on a media player operating on the client device. In one embodiment, the method normalizes the collected information by converting the different formats of the collected information into a common format and converting the different nomenclatures of the collected information into a common nomenclature. The method updates an index with the normalized information, and sends a data feed to the client device to populate the user interface on the client device with the normalized information of the index. The user interface allows the user to navigate and select the multimedia content that is available for delivery over the Internet for playback on the media player.

User interface with available multimedia content from multiple multimedia websites

EmoPlayer: A media player for video clips with affective annotations

Digital annotation of multimedia documents adds information to a document (e.g. a web page) or parts of it (a multimedia object such as an image or a video stream contained in the document). Digital annotations can be kept private or shared among different users over the internet, allowing discussions and cooperative work. We study the possibility of annotating multimedia documents with objects which are in turn of multimedial nature. Annotations can refer to whole documents or single portions thereof, as usual, but also to multi-objects, i.e. groups of objects contained in a single document. We designed and developed a new digital annotation system organized in a client-server architecture, where the client is a plug-in for a standard web browser and the servers are repositories of annotations to which different clients can login. Annotations can be retrieved and filtered, and one can choose different annotation servers for a document. We present a platform-independent design for such a system, and illustrate a specific implementation for Microsoft Internet Explorer on the client side and on JSP/MySQL for the server side.

MADCOW: a multimedia digital annotation system

Digital annotation of multimedia documents adds personal information to a document (e.g. a web page) or parts of it (a multimedia object such as an image or a video stream contained in the document). Digital annotations can be kept private or shared among different users over the internet, allowing discussions and cooperative work. We discuss some architectural solutions and storage schemas, to the problem of annotating multimedia documents with objects which are in turn of multimedial nature. Annotations can refer to whole documents or single portions thereof, as usual, but also to multi-objects, i.e. groups of objects contained in a single document. We present a new digital annotation system organized in a client-server architecture, where the client is a plug-in for a standard web browser and the servers are repositories of annotations to which different clients can login. Annotations can be retrieved and filtered, based on their metadata descriptors, and possibly on their content, and one can choose different annotation servers for a document. An implementation integrated in a widely used Web browser is discussed.

Laura Orso

Papers

MADCOW: a multimedia digital annotation system

Storing and retrieving multimedia web notes