Newsletter Issue 3 

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Promoting Knowledge in the Fields of Information Access and Personalization:
Past and Upcoming Events

Georgia Koutrika collates reactions to past events organized by IAP and gives information on events planned for the coming months.

Promotion of knowledge about available and new practices in the fields of information access and personalization in digital libraries is a long-term goal of the cluster activities. Towards this end, information sharing, and dissemination activities have taken place in the past, and more are planned in for the near future.

Past Events

3rd International Summer School on Digital Library Technologies (ISDL 2004)
Pisa, Italy, 6-10 September 2004

The 3rd International Summer School on Digital Library Technologies (ISDL 2004), focused on 'User-Centered Design of Digital Libraries' in collaboration with User-Interface and visualization cluster. The school was directed towards members of the research community in the wide sense, i.e. graduate students and young researchers and professionals involved in R&D in digital library-related areas.

30 people took part. These represented mostly the academic computer science community, but with participants coming from the industry and the user communities interested in digital library technologies (libraries, archives and museums). Seven lecturers from various user environments analyzed a broad set of requirements for digital library systems and discussed the state of the art in several user-related themes such as user interfaces, information visualization, personalization, and recommendation. One of the participants, Jehad Najjar of Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven, gives us his personal view of the event:

"I really enjoyed the summer school! I'm not doing my research in the field of digital libraries, but in the field of learning objects repositories, which is a special sort of digital libraries. I'm using empirical analysis to evaluate the actual use made of learning objects and metadata in learning object repositories. This summer school was a wonderful opportunity for me to:

• learn more about digital libraries from experts who lectured in the school.
• meet key persons from the field of digital libraries and human computer interaction.
• have interesting discussions and get useful feedback from colleagues in the field of digital libraries.

It was a great opportunity for me to meet Prof. Alan Dix (Lancaster University, UK). I enjoyed his interactive lectures on user interaction design and information visualization as well. Also, I enjoyed the discussions we had with him during the coffee breaks and at the dinner we had in the city of Pisa. I also appreciated the chance to meet Prof. Yannis Ioannidis (University of Athens, Greece) who gave a very useful lecture on personalized systems behaviour, which is quite relevant to my research. Meeting Prof. Barry Smyth (University College Dublin, Ireland) was also a very welcome opportunity. He presented a number of interesting personalization applications being developed by his research group. I particularly liked the I-Spy personalized search engine http://ispy.ucd.ie/fc?actionId=index

The School social events were perfectly organized! Thanks to the organizers from ISTI-CNR (Pisa, Italy), DELOS group and to the Italian students whom I met there! This year I'm presenting part of my research at the ECDL 2005 conference in Vienna. I hope to have make further contacts among people from the community of digital libraries there!"

Future Digital Library Management Systems Workshop
Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany, 29 March - 1 April 2005

The workshop entitled Future Digital Library Management Systems was a collaborative effort between the Digital library Architecture and Information Access and Personalization clusters. This workshop, the 8th in the DELOS series of Thematic Workshops, was devoted to two critical themes: Information Access and System Architecture. The General Chair, Gerhard Weikum, and the two Programme Co-Chairs, Yannis Ioannidis and Hans-Jfrg Schek had compiled an interesting programme with a keynote (Peter Buneman), three invited talks (Stefan Gradmann, Keith Jeffery, and Michalis Vazirgiannis) and four regular sessions.

With respect to system architecture, the topics of primary interest were Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Data Management, Grid Middleware (Grid), and Service-oriented Architecture (SoA). Within respect to information access, among the key issues of interest were organization of diverse types of information within an individual source, efficient and effective search and support of new trends in user interfaces for future systems.

The objective of the workshop was to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in these two areas and how they relate to one another. Principal aims were to identify fundamental system services that allow the development and operation of future digital libraries, and to explore the main directions in which technical development was likely to go. One of the participants, Harald Krottmaier of IICM, Graz University of Technology, gives us his personal view of the event:

"The first day started with two sessions where both architectural issues and semantics and context in the field of digital libraries were discussed. We heard eight presentations from DELOS partners and they presented actual scientific results. On the second day another regular session took place related to search and indexing. Four papers were presented. Thereafter we discussed working group topics. Because of the bad weather the planned (and, as we heard traditional) hiking tour didn't take place and we continued our discussions. Another search and indexing session happened on the third day with four presentations. On the final day the results of our working group discussions were presented.

  

Some 50 participants took part in the workshop. Dagstuhl as a venue is fantastic: the largest computer-science related library in Germany is located there where there is 24/7 open access to the library. Some clever touches (e.g. randomised seat arrangement) made it possible to communicate intensively with other workshop participants as compared with traditional conferences. Summarising it was a very successful workshop with many discussions and interesting presentations."

The programme and technical details of the two events can be found as follows:

DELOS Summer School http://www.delos.info/eventlist/isdl3.html
Dagstuhl workshop http://dbis.cs.unibas.ch/delos_website/8thworkshop.html

Upcoming Events

The workshop entitled Personalization in Digital Libraries, originally planned for the summer of 2005 has been postponed for the summer of 2006. The reason for the change is to avoid conflict with the Personalized Information Access workshop that has been independently initiated as part of the User Modelling Conference, in Edinburgh, UK, 24-25 July 2005. This event will now be co-sponsored and co-organized by DELOS, hence maximizing the breadth of the relevant networking activities.

PIA 2005 - Workshop on New Technologies for Personalized Information Access, in Edinburgh, UK
24-25 July 2005

As the amount of information available, especially on the Web and in modern digital libraries, is increasing at a tremendous rate, the roles of user modelling and personalized information access are also increasing in significance. Equipped with user modelling tools capable of comprehending specific user information needs, new retrieval tools will be able to filter out irrelevant information more effectively, rank information in the most suitable way, compare the contents of different documents, personalize information presentation and to tailor man-machine interaction more satisfactorily. A range of new technologies for personalized information access is responding to these new challenges within all information access paradigms - from classic "ad-hoc" information retrieval to information filtering, browsing, and visualization.

The goals of this workshop are to intensify the exchange of innovative ideas between the different research communities involved, to provide an overview of current activities in the area of personalized information access, and to point out connections between them. The workshop will focus in particular on researchers working on ontologies, computational linguistics, user modelling and profiling, user-adaptive interfaces, digital libraries in their various combined forms.

This workshop is collocated with the International Conference on User Modeling 2005 and is extremely interesting and relevant to the field of digital libraries. Therefore, in addition to the above, it is a welcome opportunity for DELOS colleagues active in the area of personalization to exchange ideas with the user modelling community and attend the UM conference.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Jehad Najjar, Computer Science Department, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, Harald Krottmaier, Institute for Information Systems and Computer Media (IICM), Faculty of Computer Science, Graz, University of Technology, Austria and Yannis Ioannidis, leader of the Information Access and Personalization cluster, for their contributions to this report.

Author Details

Georgia Koutrika
University of Athens
Email:
Telephone: +30 210 727 5242
Fax: +30 210 727 5214