Library Projects
Knowledge-based Editing and Visualization
for Hypermedia Encyclopedias
Christoph Hüser, Klaus Reichenberger, Lothar Rostek, and Norbert Streitz
O
ne of the main goals in developing digital
libraries is to provide users with opportu-
nities for accessing and using information
in highly flexible and user-oriented ways
not available in current information repositories.This
implies a focus on supporting the intellectual access
to information and to consider the context of the
information request. Systems for digital libraries
should be able to select the appropriate type and
amount of information from a comprehensive pool
and compose it on the fly for a meaningful and
coherent presentation which might have never
occurred before or never will again after this event
because it is customized to the current situation.
In order to meet these goals, one has to adopt a
new perspective towards information retrieval, the
notion of documents, and publishing in general.
This is achieved by utilizing the paradigm shift cur-
rently taking place in electronic publishing caused
by hypertext and hypermedia. That is, no longer
viewing documents as static entities published at one
point in time in a definite form, but as dynamic and
networked collections of information composed on
demand and presented with possibilities for interac-
tion. This also allows for multiple views on the con-
tent according to different aspects of interest
initiated by different users.
At the Integrated Publications and Information
Systems Institute (GMD-IPSI) in Darmstadt, Ger-
many, we are developing concepts and tools sup-
porting the production and use of innovative
publication products as flexibly compiled cross-sec-
tional information collections. These efforts are part
of the Europublishing project which is funded by
the European R&D program RACE II. As a concrete
application, we use the Dictionary of Art which is to
be published this year by Macmillan Publishers Ltd.,
U.K., as a 34-volume print edition. More than 6,000
authors and 50 editors have been involved in its con-
ventional publication process for over 15 years. Our
research focuses on providing support for the com-
plex and demanding editorial work and on the pre-
sentation of hypermedia publications (see Figure 1).
Like digital library applications, the Dictionary of
Art poses problems of large amounts of information
and thus of individual access involving the selection
and combination of information which is put togeth-
er by users demands. As is true for all electronic
publication products, there is the additional chal-
lenge to meet the quality standards of traditional
publishing, in particular of design and layout when
presenting the information on the screen.
Our approach for meeting these requirements is
based on the three concepts which also reflect the
overall process. First, we use an object-oriented rep-
resentation of a formal representation of facts which
COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM April 1995/Vol. 38, No. 4 49
 Figure 1. User interface for the Dictionary of Art

are extracted from Dictionary of Art source materi- ment are the Editor’s Workbench for advanced
al in order to create a powerful knowledge base. hypermedia publications and an automatic visualiza-
Second, we support a process of network editing and tion engine. The Editor’s Workbench reflects our
enrichment, partially achieved by automatic means view that maintaining and editing a knowledge base
and partially by sophisticated tools for the human of extracted facts remains an intellectual task. How-
editor who is part of the editorial cycle. Third, we ever, the Editor’s Workbench (see Figure 2) makes
employ a set of procedures and tools for automatic pre- the added value of the intellectual efforts accessible
sentation of results utilizing the underlying formal for further processing. The skeleton of the knowl-
representation. edge base is an object network consisting of Dictio-
The core components of our publishing environ- nary of Art articles and domain-specific objects such
as representations of art styles,
artists, and works of art.
Schema and update behavior
of these object types are mod-
eled using the frame-based
representation tool SmallTalk
Frame Kit (SFK). It supports a
variety of consistency checks
and atomicity of complex
update operations.
For knowledge acquisition—
that is, for populating the
object network-—we experi-
ment with automatic text pro-
cessing techniques ranging
from pattern-oriented parsing
to full text analysis applied, e.g.,
to biography articles. The head
of the dictionary biographies is
a particularly well-structured,
densely phrased piece of text
that contains the essential facts
Figure 2. Conceptual architecture of the Editor’s Workbench of a person’s life structured

50 April 1995/Vol. 38, No. 4 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM


according to editorial guidelines. These guidelines
are encoded in the rules of our parsing and text-to-
object conversion tools (XGrammar).
Allowing flexible information access to the knowl-
edge base results in unpredictable content selections
to be presented. This requires an automatic genera-
tion of graphical presentation in combination with
text generation which flexibly transforms complex
knowledge representations into readable natural lan-
guage 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 con-
tent. 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 rela-
tional properties serves to determine whether a par-
ticular domain relation can be visualized using a
particular graphical relation. When a conflict-free set
of graphical relations has been decided an optimiza-
tion 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-orient-
ed 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 graphi-
cal 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 struc-
ture and creation of an object network representing an elec-
tronic 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 GMD-
IPSI. 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
Library Projects
The University of
California CD-ROM
Information System
Deane Merrill, Nathan Parker,
Fredric Gey, and Chris Stuber
T
he University of California CD-ROM Infor-
mation 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 CD-
ROMs (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
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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