SIMILE : WWW2004 DevDay Proposal

Hi, 

I would like to submit a proposal for a presentation at WWW2004 DevDay on
behalf of the SIMILE project. 

SIMILE [1] is a joint project conducted by the W3C, HP, MIT Libraries, and
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The need to be
able to support a wide variety of metadata schemas, to integrate them, and
to expose them all to simple, flexible search and retrieval mechanisms has
become a major challenge for libraries in the Web era. SIMILE seeks to
enhance inter-operability among digital assets by leveraging and extending
DSpace [2] and enhancing its support for arbitrary schemas and metadata,
primarily though the application of RDF and Semantic Web techniques. 

The SIMILE team has put together a prototype to demonstrate these ideas. It
takes data from collections from Artstor [3] and OpenCourseWare [4], along
with the Library of Congress Thesaurus of Graphic Materials [5], Library of
Congress Authority records [6] via a prototype service created by OCLC [7],
and the Wikipedia public domain encyclopedia [8], and converts this data to
RDF using the SKOS [9], VCard [10], Dublin Core [11] and IEEE LOM [12]
schemas. It then automatically identifies equivalences in the data using
Levenshtein distances [13] to produce an OWL file to map between the
datasets. This OWL file is edited to resolve ambiguous equivalences, then
the data is loaded into a novel browser that combines both faceted browsing
and RDF relational browsing. 

We would like to demonstrate this prototype at the Dev Day session, outline
the technology that it uses, and also discuss further work that needs to be
done before this approach can be scaled up to production systems that deal
with the data volumes we would expect in real life deployment.

We anticipate the presentation will talk around 45 minutes plus questions
and is suitable for inclusion in the Semantic Web track. 

[1] http://web.mit.edu/simile/www/
[2] http://www.dspace.org/
[3] http://www.artstor.org/
[4] http://ocw.mit.edu/
[5] http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/tgm1/
[6] http://authorities.loc.gov/
[7] http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/archive/alcme.htm
[8] http://www.wikipedia.org/
[9] http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core
[10] http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/NOTE-vcard-rdf-20010222/
[11] http://dublincore.org/
[12] http://kmr.nada.kth.se/el/ims/metadata.html
[13] http://www.merriampark.com/ld.htm

Dr Mark H. Butler
Research Scientist, HP Labs Bristol
http://www-uk.hpl.hp.com/people/marbut

Received on Tuesday, 13 April 2004 10:41:28 UTC