Superimposed Information

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Superimposed Information
CS4624 Multimedia, Hypertext, and Information
Access
Uma Murthy and Edward Fox
Source NSF/NSDL project proposal 0405396
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Outline for today

• Introduction to superimposed information and
  related concepts
  
• Demonstrations
• Activity

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Consider this scenario

• A biology professor is preparing for a class on
  the brain
  
• Most of her class material comes from existing
  (multimedia) resources
  
• While researching for material, she selects bits
  of information from various resources
  
• A few paragraphs from various articles
• Individual chapters from different electronic
  books
  
• Images and parts of images
• Clips in audio lectures on the brain

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Scenario continued ...

• For this topic, she prepares course material such
  as lecture notes, comparison charts, concept
  maps, and multimedia presentations, etc.
  
• She shares this with her students and other
  faculty
  
• Later, students and other faculty use these newly
  created information for their personal
  (educational) tasks

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Functionality required

• At varying document granularities
• Select and annotate multimedia information
• Link information to make new associations
• Organize/arrange selected information into
  desired structures
  
• With existing and new information, be able to
• Share and reuse
• Find and re-find

Work with information selections in situ (in
their original form and context)
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Work with information selections in situ

• Select and annotate multimedia information
• Link information to make new associations
• Organize/arrange selected information into
  desired structures

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The problem

• Digital Libraries (and the WWW) offer little
  support for working with information resources at
  sub-document granularity in situ
  
• Specificity of reference of sub-document
  information
  
• Going beyond annotation to provide knowledge
  organization and management capabilities
  
• Indexing, searching, browsing, visualizing and
  sharing new resources created from existing DL
  resources
  
• Lack of formal foundations for such support,
  which may lead to divergent development efforts
  and interoperability issues

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The proposal

• To define and build a superimposed-information-sup
  ported digital library

• To define and build a superimposed-information-sup
  ported digital library

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A superimposed-information-supported digital
library (SI-DL)
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What is superimposed information?
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Superimposed information (SI)

• New interpretation of existing information
• New content, new structures
• Focuses on
• Information at sub-document granularity
• Information from heterogeneous sources
  (multimedia content)
  
• Working with information in situ

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Origin of SI

• This basic need had been addressed in diverse
  ways, with varying degrees of success, for many
  years
  
• concordances, annotations, comments
• bookmarks, concept maps, digital annotations,
• The term SI was coined in 1999 by researchers,
  currently collaborating with us, now at Portland
  State University
  
• Lois Delcambre
• David Maier

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Superimposing information (1/2)

• Overlaying new information on top of existing
  information
  
• Add new data
• Impose new schema or model

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Superimposing information (2/2)
Superimposed layer New information/structures

• Mark
• Reference to base information element

Base layer Existing information from heterogeneou
s sources text, images, audio/video documents
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What is a mark?

• An abstraction that represents a selection of
  information inside a base layer
  
• Allows isolation of marked information while
  maintaining links to the base layer
  
• Includes
• Properties of marked region (address and document
  format information)
  
• Properties of mark creation (who, when, where)
• May be represented as a URI
• May be used to retrieve context information

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Benefits

• Specificity of reference
• Flexibility
• Identifying interesting (parts of) objects
• Making connections between selections
• Managing collections of selections
• Preservation of context
• No redundant copies of existing information

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SI and hypertext

• In SI, we deal with a lower level of conventional
  hypertext
  
• Flexibility of defining nodes at sub-document
  granularity
  
• Use URIs in superimposed layer to link to marks
  in base layer

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Superimposed applications

• SI-integrated concept maps
• Use of marks as URIs in concept maps
• SIERRA
• An enhanced image description and retrieval
  application
  

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Integrating SI with IHMC CMapTools

• We make use of existing features in IHMC
  CMapTools, a concept mapping tool, and add
  features to support SI.
  
• Connect concepts by adding linking phrases to
  information at sub-document granularity
  
• Treat marks as resources
• Make use of a URI representation of marks

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Creating a mark
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Using it in a concept map 1 of 2
URI representation of a mark sparcemarkfodderS
UVBZ2V..
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Using it in a concept map 2 of 2
Mark as a resource
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Activating a mark from a concept map
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SIERRA an enhanced image description and
retrieval application

• Annotate parts of images
• Retrieve information as annotations and
  associated images/sub-images in two ways
  
• Images or marks similar to a specified image or
  mark
  
• Annotations containing specified query terms

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Annotating an image
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Searching over annotations
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Searching over content of images/sub-images
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Demonstrations
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References

• Maier, D. and L.M. Delcambre. Superimposed
  Information for the Internet. In WebDB 99. 1999.
  
• Murthy, S. and D. Maier, SPARCE Superimposed
  Pluggable Architecture for Contexts and Excerpts.
  2003, OGI CSE.
  
• Murthy, U., Ahuja, K., Murthy, S. and Fox, E.A.,
  SIMPEL A Superimposed Multimedia Presentation
  Editor and Player. In Proceedings of the 6th
  Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, (Chapel
  HIll, NC, USA, 2006), 377-377. http//doi.acm.org/
  10.1145/1141753.1141873
• Murthy, U., Fox, E.A. and Delcambre, L. Enhancing
  Concept Mapping Tools Below and Above to
  Facilitate the Use of Superimposed Information.
  To appear in proceedings of the Second
  International Conference on Concept Mapping. (San
  Jose, Costa Rica Sept. 5-8, 2006).
  http//si.dlib.vt.edu/publications/SIandCMapsPaper
  2006.pdf
• Murthy, U., Torres, R.d.S. and Fox, E.A., A
  Superimposed Application for Enhanced Image
  Description and Retrieval. (Demo proposal
  accepted at the European conference on digital
  libraries, Alicante, Spain, 2006).
  http//si.dlib.vt.edu/publications/ECDL2006_Murthy
  _DemoCameraReady.pdf
• Fox, E.A. and U. Murthy. The Superimposed
  Information Project at Virginia Tech -
  http//si.dlib.vt.edu/. 2005.
  
• SPARCE website - http//datalab.cs.pdx.edu/sparce/
  . 2005.