Library Projects
according to editorial guidelines. These guidelines
are encoded in the rules of our parsing and text-toobject conversion tools (XGrammar).
Allowing flexible information access to the knowledge base results in unpredictable content selections
to be presented. This requires an automatic generation of graphical presentation in combination with
text generation which flexibly transforms complex
knowledge representations into readable natural language texts. Our approach is unique in so far as there
are no predefined templates for the presentations,
such as timeline, network or geographical diagrams.
Although a variety of presentations is created by
our system, each one is a result of the specific request
combined with the available information and
depends on the characteristics of the selected content. This integrative approach is based on a common
description for both the facts represented in the
knowledge base and for the basic graphical means of
expression: both are described as relations—existing
either between domain objects or between graphical
elements. Correspondence in their characteristic relational properties serves to determine whether a particular domain relation can be visualized using a
particular graphical relation. When a conflict-free set
of graphical relations has been decided an optimization algorithm, based on a force-model, is applied to
compute the final presentation.
We built an environment consisting of integrated
prototypes providing the functions described here. As
a whole, they address major issues relevant to digital
libraries of the future where we expect the source
material is going to be beyond scanned images of text
pages of existing books. The described prototypes are
part of a more comprehensive effort at GMD-IPSI
including multimedia archives based on object-oriented databases, support for cooperative work, such as
multiple authors and editors, and information retrieval
and 3D visualization for large document bases. C
References
1. Kamps, T., Reichenberger, K. A dialogue approach to graphical information access. Designing User Interfaces for Hypermedia,
Schuler, W., Hannemann, J., and Streitz, N., Eds. Springer,
Heidelberg (1995), 141– 55.
2. Rostek, L., Möhr, W. An editor’s workbench for an art history
reference work. In Proceedings of the ACM European Conference
on Hypermedia Technology. Edinburgh, U.K., Sept. 13 –18, 1994,
pp. 233– 238.
3. Rostek, L., Möhr, W., Fischer, D. Weaving a web: The structure and creation of an object network representing an electronic reference work. Electronic Publishing — Origination,
Dissemination and Design. Special Issue, 6, 4 Wiley, NY, 495 – 505.
Christoph Hüser is the manager of the Publications and Visualization Environment
research department at GMD-IPSI. Klaus Reichenberger is a member of the research
staff at GMD-IPSI. Lothar Rostek is a senior member of the research staff at GMDIPSI. Norbert A. Streitz is the deputy director of GMD-IPSI and the manager of the
Cooperative Hypermedia Systems research division. Email: hueser, reichen, rostek,
streitz@darmstadt.gmd.de
© ACM 0002-0782/95/0400
The University of
California CD-ROM
Information System
Deane Merrill, Nathan Parker,
Fredric Gey, and Chris Stuber
T
he University of California CD-ROM Information System replaces the equivalent of
260,000 books of published federal statistics
with a CD-ROM-based online information
system. The size of this database is currently 270 CDROMs (135GB). It contains 1990 U.S. census data
(approximately 3,000 items of socio-economic and
demographic information, including race-ethnicity,
employment, income, educational level, and poverty)
NCSA Mosaic: Document View
File
Options
Navigate
Annotate
Help
Document Title:
1990 Census Lookup (1.0.5e)
Document URL:
http: //cedr.lbl.gov/cdrom/lookup/date=788117324
(Reload this page)
Current Level: State – – Place
Ann Arbor city: FIPS.STATE=26,FIPS.PLACE90=03000
RACE
Universe: Persons
White (800–869, 971) ................................................ 90196
Black (870–934, 972) ................................................. 9785
American Indian, Eskimo, or Aleut (000–599, 935–970, 973–975):
American Indian (000–599, 973) ..................................... 263
Eskimo(935–940, 974) ................................................. 0
Aleut (941–970, 975) ................................................. 0
Asian or Pacific Islander (600–699, 976-985):
Asian (600–652, 976, 977, 979–982, 985):
Chinese (605–607, 976) .......................................... 3170
Filipino (608, 977) .............................................. 620
Japanese (611, 981) .............................................. 981
Asian Indian (600, 982) ......................................... 1469
Korean (612, 979) ............................................... 1729
Vietnamese (619, 980) ............................................. 85
Cambodian (604) .................................................... 0
Hmong (609) ........................................................ 7
Laotian (613) ...................................................... 0
Thai (618)......................................................... 43
Other Asian (601–603, 610, 614–617, 620–652, 985) ................ 386
Pacific Islander (653–699, 978, 983, 984):
Polynesian (653–659, 978, 983):
Hawaiian (653, 654, 978) ........................................ 23
Samoan (655, 983) ................................................ 0
Tongan (657) ..................................................... 0
Other Polynesian (656, 658, 659) ................................. 0
Micronesian (660–675, 984):
Guamanian (660, 984) ............................................. 0
Other Micronesian (661–675) ...................................... 0
Back Forward Home Reload Open... Save As... Clone New Window Close Window
Figure 1. Example use of LOOKUP system to
retrieve the racial composition of the population
of Ann Arbor, Michigan.
COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM
April 1995/Vol. 38, No. 4
51
for every block and census tract in the U.S., as well as
U.S. foreign trade data by commodity from every city
in the U.S. to every country in the world. It also contains the digitized map outline boundary data for city
blocks for the entire U.S. (census TIGER files).
The data are stored on 45 Pioneer six-disk CDROM jukebox changers connected to four Sun
Microsystems SPARC workstations. Users can access
the data in four ways: (1) Census LOOKUP, a WorldWide Web server providing unrestricted access to a
30% subset of the data (1990 Census data). As of the
end of 1994, LOOKUP had been accessed by 6,000
different users. (2) A menu system for MS-DOS computers having NFS Internet capability; this method
has had more than 17,000 recorded accesses. (3)
Direct NFS (Network File Services) mounts. (4)
Anonymous FTP (file transfer protocol).
The URL http://cedr.lbl.gov/cdrom/doc/cdrom.
html describes all four access methods.
Acknowledgments.
This work was supported in part by the Director,
Office of Epidemiology and Health Surveillance;
Office of Health; Office of Environment, Safety and
Health; U.S. Department of Energy under Contract
No. DE-AC03-76-SF00098. C
Deane Merrill is a computer scientist at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL) and
coprincipal investigator of the Populations at Risk to Environmental Pollution (PAREP)
project. Nathan Parker is a software designer at LBL and a student in Electrical Engineering at University of California, San Diego. Fredric Gey is assistant director of the
UC Data Archive and Technical Assistance, which manages social science and health
statistics databases for the University of California, Berkeley. Chris Stuber is an employee
in the Telecommunications Division of the U.S. Bureau of the Census.
© ACM 0002-0782/95/0400
Envision: A User-Centered Database of
Computer Science Literature
Lenwood S. Heath, Deborah Hix, Lucy T. Nowell,
William C. Wake,
Guillermo A. Averboch, Eric Labow, Scott A. Guyer, Dennis J. Brueni,
Robert K. France, Kaushal Dalal, and Edward A. Fox
P
roject Envision is an early NSF-funded digital library effort to develop a multimedia
collection of computer science literature
with full-text searching and full-content
retrieval capabilities. Envision was launched in 1991
in accordance with the ACM Publications Board’s
plans for encouraging research studies to develop
an electronic archive for computer science.
The Envision system consists of specially-developed components: a query server, an object-oriented
database management system, a presentation server,
and the Envision client. The query server is a vectorspace search system (i.e., MARIAN [2]). The objectoriented DBMS deals with the many kinds of entities
and media types involved. Since bibliographic and
full-text entries are encoded in SGML, the presentation server converts retrieved documents to HTML
for final rendering. Hence, Envision’s document
delivery components can behave as a WWW server,
though considerably higher functionality results
from coupling with the rest of this highly interactive
system. In particular, the Envision client provides a
much more powerful user interface than is commonly found with retrieval systems.
52
April 1995/Vol. 38, No. 4
COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM
Envision features flexible information visualization, displaying search results as a matrix of icons.
As shown in the figure, each document in a search
results set is represented by an icon in the Graphic
View, while the Item Summary shows a textual listing of bibliographic information. The Graphic
View gives users control over how search results are
displayed, by manipulating values assigned to the
matrix axes. Users can select the interpretation of
icon position along the x- and y-axes, as well as
icon color, shape, size, and label. Document attributes that can be shown in the display include relevance, publication year, type, size, author name,
and index terms.
This interface resulted from extensive studies of
users and their tasks, careful design and implementation to support user visualization and interaction
needs, and iterative refinement in concert with
usability studies [3, 4]. Extensive empirical studies
show strong user interest and satisfaction.
The ACM data in the Envision database include
bibliographic records from ACM Guide to Computing Literature, review articles from Computing
Reviews, full-texts supplied by the typesetter of the