NACSIS has started its COE (Center of Excellence) program funded by the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture from April,1995. The objective of the program is to promote and develop world class research of excellence in the field of scholary information, information science and technology. Through this COE program , one foreign research fellow and two post doctoral research associates were invited to create and engage in the new strategic research area with NACSIS members.
Dr. Ulrich WATTENBERG was invited to NACSIS from October, 1995 to study the international flow of scientific information together with users or intermediaries of foreign countries. His research topic is: Viewing the International Flow of Japanese Scientific Information.
Japan has taken various steps to strengthen not only its publicly funded basic research but also its facilities to provide learned information to the outside world. (where "outside" means the non-Japanese speaking world.) Now, the information business has always two sides: providersÕ ideas have to meet usersÕ wishes and vice versa.
After having served as the head of the Tokyo Liaison Office of the German Institute of Documen-tation (now GMD Tokyo Office) from its establishment in 1977 up to 1993, with its early efforts to access Japanese Databases and with its document delivery activities for German libraries in various fields with nationwide responsibilities. Drawing from experiences of the past, a review of the Japanese library system as the most important source of primary information for many years to come seems to be the proper start of evaluation. Naturally this includes a survey of the main electronic information systems in Japan as sources of both bibliographic information and actual primary information. In a second step conclusions will be sketched for the international flow of Japanese information based on experience accumulated in Germany. There are problems specific to each country, but also many common issues, e.g. the basic question how far the state has to go, to ensure that everybody can access information on an equal basis.
Here the delicate question remains for every country, how to provide quality at reasonable cost. In the case of Japan, to solve the language problem remains another problem to tackled. We cannot expect too much from machine translation, but fortunately there is a generation growing up in Germany (and elsewhere), which combines knowledge in e.g. natural sciences and Japanese. In a long run, the information gap will hopefully narrow by joint efforts from the Japanese side and the Òoutside worldÓ. His study within the COE invitation programme are expected to contribute to this progress.
Dr. Masato OGUCHI has been a COE researcher at NACSIS since April 1995. His research interests include distributed computing systems, computer networks, memory consistency theories, performance evaluation of computer systems, parallel computer architecture, and distributed operating systems. He received his Ph.D. degree in 1995 from the University of Tokyo, with a theme of a study on Distributed Shared Memory in a wide area distributed environment. His latest research focuses on a caching proxy mechanism of a distributed information retrieval system such as the World-Wide Web, which is realized on a wide area network environment. He is also planning to realize a scalable multimedia server which can manipulate contents of multimedia information for example, not only text and image but also motion picture and/or audio files. Since this is a distributed open system, it is possible to cooperate with other servers so as to make reciprocal use of other sites' resources.
Dr. Hironobu GOTODA joined NACSIS as a COE researcher in January 1996. His research interests include shape modeling in computer graphics and related applications. More specifically, surface deformations and their associated structural changes are of particular interest. Although modeling the shapes of rigid objects, such as mechanical parts, has long been a main research subject in computer graphics, little attempts have been made to model the shapes and behavior of deformable objects, such as cloth, paper, rubber sheet, and soap bubbles. Two novel approaches have been developed by Dr. Gotoda to model poorly stretchable sheet materials such as paper and cloth. One is to apply the singularity theory, a recent achievement of differential topology, for deriving char-acteristic points of wrinkled surfaces. Since the characteristic points are located at the branching of ridges or ravines, the wrinkle structures of the surfaces can be compactly represented using these points. This subsequently leads to a model of cloth-like surfaces, which is appropriate for representing qualitative differ-ences (smoothness, coarseness, etc.) among various sheet materials.
The other approach is to utilize the property of being poorly stretchable. It is well known that any regular surface obtained by bending a sheet of unstretchable material is a developable surface, which has useful geometric simplicity. Taking account of this fact, a model was proposed which consists of two sequential steps: approximation and relaxation.
The above two modeling approaches are currently being extended and integrated into a new model which can handle more general classes of deformable objects. Furthermore, an open and scalable system is also planned in the future to experience virtual Origami or fashion designing through computer networks based on the VRML technology.