Projects...
SCALE - Services for a Customizable Authority Linking Environment
With funding from the
National Science
Foundation,
we propose to provide two broad classes of service to the NSDL: First, we
will provide automatic linking services that automatically bind key words
and phrases to supplementary information. Such automatic linking services
are already in place in the Perseus Digital Library These services will
aid students, professionals outside a particular discipline, and the
interested public read documents full of unfamiliar technical terms and
concepts. Astronomy students and curious amateurs may need to see
expansions of some acronyms, e.g., MACHO: massive compact halo object,
such as neutron stars and brown dwarfs or pictures of "Kuiper belt
objects."
These services can be of particular help to undergraduates as
they shift from textbooks to scientific literature: the student ploughing
through research papers on bioluminescence will, for example, be able to
locate information about particular chemical processes or relevant species
of echinoderms.
As a service to support all levels of reading in the National Science
Digital Library, we propose to:
- create and maintain authority lists of technical terms and concepts
harvested from OAI metadata, extracted from full text, and imported from
existing authority lists
- extend our current automatic hypertext capabilities to embed glosses of
technical terms and links to related passages within HTML, PDF, and XML
documents in the NSDL
- provide term detection and document linking through SOAP-based web
services
- evaluate the interface to and functionality of our services in
cooperation with the National Virtual Observatory
- customize the service through explicit user configuration and adaptive
learning of preferences
collect annotations on the quality of links to improve precision and
provide a training set for future systems
