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CS 430: Information Discovery
Lecture 21
Non-Textual Materials 1

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Course Administration
Discussion classes
• Attend!
• Speak!
Assignment 2, queries
Mail has been sent to everybody. Contact cs430 if you have any outstanding questions.

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Examples
Content maps photograph bird songs and images software data set video
Attribute lat. and long., content subject, date and place field mark, bird song task, algorithm survey characteristics subject, date, etc.

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Surrogates
Surrogates for searching
• Catalog records
• Finding aids
• Classification schemes
Surrogates for browsing
• Summaries (thumbnails, titles, skims, etc.)

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Catalog Records for Non-Textual
Materials
• General metadata standards, such as Dublin Core and MARC, can be used to create a textual catalog record of non-textual items.
• Subject based metadata standards apply to specific categories of materials, e.g., FGDC for geospatial materials.
• Text-based searching methods can be used to search these catalog records.

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Example 1: Photographs
Photographs in the Library of Congress's American
Memory collections
In American Memory, each photograph is described by a
MARC record.
The photographs are grouped into collections, e.g., The
Northern Great Plains, 1880-1920: Photographs from the Fred
Hultstrand and F.A. Pazandak Photograph Collections
Information discovery is by:
• searching the catalog records
• browsing the collections

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Photographs: Cataloguing Difficulties
Automatic
• Image recognition methods are very primitive
Manual
• Photographic collections can be very large
• Many photographs may show the same subject
• Photographs have little or no internal metadata (no title page)
• The subject of a photograph may not be known
(Who are the people in a picture? Where is the location?)

Photographs: Difficulties for Users
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Searching
• Often difficult to narrow the selection down by searching -browsing is required
• Criteria may be different from those in catalog (e.g., graphical characteristics)
Browsing
• Offline. Handling many photographs is tedious. Photographs can be damaged by repeated handling
• Online. Viewing many images can be tedious. Screen quality may be inadequate.

Example 2: Mathematical Software
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Netlib
• A digital library that of mathematical software (Jack
Dongarra and Eric Grosse).
• Exchange of software in numerical analysis, especially for supercomputers with vector or parallel architectures.
• Organization of material assumes that users are mathematicians and scientists who will incorporate the software into their own computer programs.
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The collections are arranged in a hierarchy. The editors use their knowledge of the specific field to decide the method of organization.

Multimedia 3: Geospatial Information
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Example: Alexandria Digital Library at the University of
California, Santa Barbara
• Funded by the NSF Digital Libraries Initiative since 1994.
• Collections include any data referenced by a geographical footprint. terrestrial maps, aerial and satellite photographs, astronomical maps, databases, related textual information
• Program of research with practical implementation at the university's map library

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Alexandria User Interface

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Computer Systems and User
Interfaces
Computer systems
• Digitized maps and geospatial information -- large files
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Wavelets provide multi-level decomposition of image
-> first level is a small coarse image
-> extra levels provide greater detail
User interfaces
• Small size of computer displays
• Slow performance of Internet in delivering large files
-> retain state throughout a session

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Alexandria: Information Discovery
Metadata for information discovery
Coverage: geographical area covered, such as the city of
Santa Barbara or the Pacific Ocean.
Scope: varieties of information, such as topographical features, political boundaries, or population density.
Latitude and longitude provide basic metadata for maps and for geographical features .

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Special Purpose Systems
Many non-textual collections have developed special purpose methods for organizing materials and for information discovery.

Finding Aids and the EAD
F inding aid
• A list, inventory, index or other textual document created by an archive, library or museum to describe holdings.
• May provide fuller information than is normally contained within a catalog record or be less specific.
• Does not necessarily have a detailed record for every item.
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The Encoded Archival Description (EAD)
• A format (XML DTD) used to encode electronic versions of finding aids.
• Heavily structured -- much of the information is derived from hierarchical relationships.

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GAMS: Guide to Available
Mathematical Software

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Gazetteer
Gazetteer : database and a set of procedures that translate representations of geospatial references: place names, geographic features, coordinates postal codes, census tracts
Search engine tailored to peculiarities of searching for place names .
Research is making steady progress at feature extraction , using automatic programs to identify objects in aerial photographs or printed maps -- topic for long-term research.

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Collection-Level Metadata
Collection-level metadata is used to describe a group of items.
For example, one record might describe all the images in a photographic collection.
Note: There are proposals to add collection-level metadata records to Dublin Core. However, a collection is not a document-like object.

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Collection-Level Metadata

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Direct Searching of Content
Sometimes it is possible to match a query against the content of a digital object. The effectiveness varies from field to field.
Examples
• Images -- crude characteristics of color, texture, shape, etc.
• Music -- optical recognition of score
• Bird song -- spectral analysis of sounds
• Fingerprints

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Image Retrieval: Blobworld

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Data Mining
• Extraction of information from online data.
• Not a topic of this course.