Digital Library Project Stanford University Quarterly Report. May 1, 1996 Reporting Period: Feb 1-April 30, 1996 1. Administrative ----------------- Osaka Gas Information Systems, a fully owned subsidiary of Japan's Osaka Gas company decided to send a visitor to our Digital Library project for one year. 2. InfoBus Architecture and Testbed ------------------------------------ We spent a considerable amount of effort on exploring the possibilities of Java for the InfoBus. Our interest lies particularly in the use of Java to distribute InfoBus access software. It would be obtained through the Web as a Java applet. Once at the client site, it would assume the role of a CORBA ORB, the core part of the CORBA system which facilitates communication with other objects. Results are promising, although the ever tightening security-related constraints of the Java execution environment makes implementations awkward. Work on the Zserver was completed. This is an InfoBus proxy which behaves towards clients like a Z39.50 server. But it does not itself contain any data. Instead, it translates incoming Z39.50 requests into InfoBus requests. These are forwarded through the InfoBus to any of the InfoBus-accessible sources. The resulting information is returned to the client as if it came from a Z39.50 service. The advantage of this is that standard Z39.50 clients can access the InfoBus without the use of our software. The Zserver completes our Z39.50 interoperability suite, complementing the University of Michigan Z39.50 client to InfoBus software reported on earlier. The University of Santa Barbara was added as an InfoBus repository. We can search over the Alexandria collection and obtain map metadata and GIF thumbnails of maps. Similarly, Project Alexandria has demonstrated access to our other sources through the InfoBus. First contacts were made with Carnegie-Mellon University to explore access to each others' collections. 3. Economics ------------ Work began on InterPay II. This work is intended to move beyond interoperability of payment to the notion of interoperability among 'shopping models'. Thus, our interoperability concerns for online financial activities are now expanding to include issues such as the sequence of component actions such as offers, invoice delivery, negotiation, verification, payment, document delivery, etc. Our framework for distributed commerce transactions was presented at an international conference on distributed computing systems. Follow-up work has improved the basic architecture and algorithm, which has been proven sound and complete. Extensions for direct trust and deadlines are in progress. In the SCAM work , we considered the case when documents are located in several distributed text databases. In this scenario, we studied several liberal and conservative techniques that helped us ``prune'' away databases that were very unlikely to have document copies. A new paper on dSCAM presents algorithms that compute ``minimal'' queries to retrieve potential copies of illegal documents in autonomous text databases. 4. User Interfaces ------------------- In parallel to the Java experiments at the infrastructure level, the user interface thrust expanded its scope to explore how the easy delivery of InfoBus access software would impact user-level interaction with the InfoBus. We focused in particular on the possibility of collaboration among users, some of which might be mobile. Our driving scenario includes a user on the road, who needs to consult with a reference librarian at home. Challenges being addressed include a good balance between screen interactions being visible to all parties, and the constraints of bandwidth and latency shortcomings. SenseMaker has evolved in that it now uses a structured hierarchical attribute interlingua for computing choices for grouping results into categories. In the previous prototype, we were using a hierarchy of target sources instead. We began to develop a conceptual model for information finding that can be thought of as a Recursive Extensible Active Card catalog for Heterogeneity (REACH). It explains the categorization activity enabled by SenseMaker as the task of creating virtual card catalogs. Formal testing of our audio-based Web interface technology has been completed. Analysis of test results is ongoing. 5. Searching ------------ Work began on experiments for measuring the cost of our query translation approach. We continued our brokering role for finding an agreement among major search engine providers to enable resource discovery, querying and rank-merging across multiple engines of different vendors. We completed and circulated a first draft of the agreement. Based on the resulting feedback, we prepared a second draft which is currently circulating among interested parties. 6. Agents --------- The Fab adaptive information retrieval system has been running "live" since the end of March, slowly building up to around 40 users. Currently 10 of those users are participating in a formal evaluation, to be completed by mid-July. 7. Miscellaneous Activities --------------------------- 7.1 Visitors and Industry Contacts - Cornell - Hitachi on several occasions - Intuit - University of Karlsruhe - LRI, France - University of Massachussetts - Matshishita - Microsoft (Bill Gates) - MIT Media Lab - NEC - Osaka Gas - SUN - Tokyo University 7.2 Public Presentations and Meetings Attended - Steve Cousins, Demonstration for research library staff at Xerox PARC - Steve Cousins, Hypertext 96 - Hector Garcia-Molina, Distinguished Lecture, Univeristy of Illinois at Chicago (Feb 2, 96) - Hector Garcia-Molina, Rebecca Lasher Meeting of DL Forum Working Group on Repositories and Interoperability, (March 11-12, 96) - Hector Garcia-Molina, Distinguished Lecture, ETH Zurich (April 22, 96) - Hector Garcia-Molina, Talk and visit to Hitachi in Tokyo, Japan (May 20-21, 1996) - Hector Garcia-Molina, Distinguished Lecture, Hong Kong Univerity (May 23, 1996) - Hector Garcia-Molina, Andreas Paepcke, University of Michigan. DLI meeting - Kenichi Kamiya, World-Wide Web conference. Presented paper - Steve Ketchpel, 16th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (DCS'96). Presented paper. - Steve Ketchpel, CommerceNet meetings - Andreas Paepcke, DELOS meeting of ERCIM. Presented overview of Stanford DL project. - Vicky Reich, User evaluation meeting at UCLA - Martin Roscheisen, Beyond Privacy as Anonymity: Rights Management Technologies for Privacy in a Market of Personal Information. Lunchtime presentation at Computers, Freedom, and Privacy. Conference on Computer Freedom and Privacy, CFP96, Boston, March 28-30. 1996. - Martin Roscheisen, IEEE Symposium on Research in Security and Privacy - Narayanan Shivakumar, DL96. Presented paper (see Bibliography below) - Terry Winograd, Steve Cousins, Kenichi Kamiya, CHI 96. Session chair. Presented poster and short paper. 7.3 Local Events - NSF/ARPA/NASA site visit - Stanford Forum. A large gathering of industry representatives. Presented InfoBus technology and SenseMaker 7.4 Regular Meetings/Seminars - Weekly Digital Library seminar - Executive committee meetings when required - Weekly technical design meetings 8. Bibliography --------------- Steve B. Cousins, Scott H. Hassan, Andreas Paepcke, and Terry Winograd. A Distributed Interface for the Digital Library. Submitted to UIST 96. Hector Garcia-Molina, Luis Gravano, and Narayanan Shivakumar. dSCAM: Finding Document Copies Across Multiple Databases. Submitted for publication to PDIS'96. Steven Ketchpel and Hector Garcia-Molina. Making Trust Explicit in Distributed Commerce Transactions. Proceedings of 16th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (DCS'96). 1996. Andreas Paepcke, Steve B. Cousins, Hector Garcia-Molina, Scott W. Hassan, Steven K. Ketchpel, Martin Roscheisen, and Terry Winograd. Using Distributed Objects for Digital Library Interoperability. IEEE Computer Magazine, 29:5. May, 1996. Andreas Paepcke. Digital Libraries: Searching Is Not Enough; What We Learned On-Site. Dlib Magazine. May, 1996. Kenichi Kamiya, Martin Roscheisen, and Terry Winograd. Grassroots: Providing a Uniform Framework for Communication, Sharing Information, and Organzing People. In Proceedings of the 5th WWW Conference, Paris. 1996. Martin Roscheisen and Terry Winograd. A Communication Agreement Framework for Access/Action Control. Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Research in Security and Privacy. Oakland. 1996. N. Shivakumar, H. Garcia-Molina. Building a Scalable and Accurate Copy Detection Mechanism. Proceedings of 1st ACM International Conference on Digital Libraries (DL'96) March 1996, Bethesda Maryland. Several working papers to be found on our Web site.