Visualizing Research Digital Libraries with Open Standards

Large scale research Digital Libraries (DLs) have a large array of potentially useful metadata. Yet, many popular DLs do not provide a convenient way to navigate the metadata or to visualize classification schema in the user session. For example, in the broad world of Management Information Systems (MIS) research, a high-level overview of MIS topics and their interrelationships would be useful to navigate a MIS DL before zooming in on a specific article. To address this obstacle, this paper describes a prototype, the Technical Report Visualizer System (TRV), which uses a wide variety of open standards to expose DL classification metadata in the navigation interface. The system captures MIS article metadata from the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) compliant arXiv e-Print archive at Cornell University. The OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is used to collect the topic metadata; the articles’ Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Computing Classification System codes. We display the topic metadata in a Java hyperbolic tree and make use of XML conceptual product and implementation product standards and specifications, such as the Dublin Core and BiblioML bibliographic metadata sets, XML Topic Maps, Xalan and Xerces, to link user navigation activity to the abstracts and full text contents of the articles. We discuss the flexibility and convenience of XML standards and link this effort to related digital library visualization approaches.