Interlinking Related Diverse Media in a Digital Library

Interlinking Related Diverse Media in a Digital Library. (May 2006) Manas Sourava Singh, B.E., R.E.C Rourkela, India Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Richard Furuta Digital libraries are widely used for organizing and presenting large collections of artifacts. However, as the digital libraries grow in size, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the user to find all the resources related to his topic of interest. It is labor intensive, time consuming and error prone to identify and link related materials manually. Thus it is important to develop automatic techniques to help the user discover and view the related resources that are available in the digital library. We have implemented an automatic interlinking mechanism for a music digital library system that spans across batch, online and on-demand phases. Since the task of generating the related links is resource and time intensive, distributing the whole process across these three phases significantly reduces the runtime overhead and improves the response time. This mechanism allows the system to display very large texts, with keywords identified and hyperlinked, with no perceivable delay to the user. Storing the artifacts in a structured manner and using the structural metadata to generate interlinkages allows us to create these links across diverse media like images, audio files, music scores, texts, etc. The implemented interlinking technique also scales well with a rapidly changing collection. The related links are displayed on demand, using AJAX technology. This allows the user to view these links without leaving the text, thus ensuring minimum disruption and continuity of action. We also have developed a generic interlinking framework which abstracts the domain independent logic for generating and displaying related links. This generic interlinking framework can be used by domain specific digital libraries to support interlinking of related resources.