No.18
September,1998
Dr. Kinji ONO
Professor and Director,
Research and Development Department, NACSIS
This article provides an overview of the research conducted at NACSIS under the COE program as well as an introduction to one of the research projects currently underway. The title of the program is “An advanced study of Informatics and the a Next-generation Information Infrastructure - An open platform for a next-generation academic and research information infrastructure -”.
The goal of this research is to carry out, from an international viewpoint, of both fundamental and applied research related to informatics and essential to the a new scientific information infrastructure that can be used well into the twenty-first century .
At present, four research projects, and individual research related to informatics are in progress. Emphasis is being placed on the following four projects.
The individual research endeavors are not limited to the current research topics being pursued by NACSIS members and involve presentations and exchanges of views at monthly COE meetings by researchers working on scientific themes . In addition, these ideas are oriented toward the creation of new projects aimed at producing concrete results.
Research results are presented to international conferences or in academic journals. Also, open research such as international collaborative research involving universities in France, the United States, and Thailand is moving forward. In the years ahead, we plan to take a flexible stance on the establishment of new projects and work positively to fulfil our role as a Center Of Excellence(COE) for information related research.
Cultural and Scientific Resource Sharing over Cyberspace
As part of the AHYDS and Phasme projects described below, a new type of database (Phasme) that relies on the intelligent use of multimedia data on a wide-area network is being developed in a prototype installation. The eventual goal is the formation of a corpus of intellectual digital assets and the establishment of an international common-access system.
Dr. Frederic Andres, visiting researcher from France, has been invited to participate in this project, a prototype model has been implemented, and verification research is now underway. The goal is to use such a new type of database to establish a system for making intellectual resources such as scientific materials consisting mainly of text and images as well as cultural and artistic creations consisting mainly of voice and video commonly available to an international audience. Also, study is progressing on multipurpose applications for information distribution and an open platform that is not dependent on the method of use. Such a prototype model has been implemented and is being tested and evaluated.
The growth of information exchange such as textual document, hypermedia data, multimedia, will still double every 6 months over the Internet. The advent of new software technologies such as media standards (JPEG,MPEG, ...), digitalization of video data, and the eruption of the Java language, combined with the explosion of the Cyberspace has heightened the demand for Hypermedia Delivery Systems. As information system become more and more complex in terms of distribution and heterogeneity, present approaches will become quickly inefficient and expensive to maintain. One of the many solution will be for organizations and libraries to turn to the use of active and customizable information system integrated within Internet and the Cyberspace for a better long term extensibility and durability.
Large scale hypermedia delivery system
As an example of this evolution, the Active HYpermedia Delivery System (AHYDS) project has been engaged since mid-1995 within the Center Of Excellence(COE) framework of the Japanese Ministry of Education, Science ,Culture and Sport. The idea is to provide micro-kernel data delivery systems based on up-to-date technologies such as data processing, OS services and multi-agent management that distribute any kind of information over large scale of heterogeneous cyberspace.
The AHYDS Project is composed of 4 research streams and issues. The core research stream is the high performance and efficient uniform management of hypermedia delivery system over large scale distributed and heterogeneous networks. It mainly addresses the issues of a dynamic, and customizable architecture to adapt database services, load balancing and fault tolerance using multi-agent support according to the environment (network, multimedia server, user, ...). The driver for the AHYDS is the Phasme DBMS an application-oriented DBMS. This micro-kernel system can be vertically customized from the data type to the execution model (data definition, plug-ins, dynamic optimization, physical layer, execution model) using plug-ins. It is a solution for efficient support of a large range of application domains. Each application is enabled to provide its own semantic to the AHYDS Platform.
The second research topic is the active capability and intelligent media information management and multimedia data visualization at the user side as a role of the user interface. An active and intelligent Java-based user interface is being developed to tackle this theme's issues.
The third research theme concerns the communication layer to support such a large delivery system. Members and investigators (Paris VI/VII University/LIP6 (France), Washington University DC (USA), and The University of Clermont-Ferrand (France)) of the TOSDHIM project (TOols for Distributed and HEterogeneous Information Management) are developing new modules concerning the QoS support for media delivery to guarantee a high efficient and transparent document exchange between AHYDS sites. The last research issue is hypermedia, multimedia processing and retrieval including full text management as a plug-ins of the information repository. The aspect concerning the image management used by AHYDS results from a collaborative effort between Netimage SA and NACSIS to provide high performance multi-resolution management. The multi-resolution pyramidal approach is based on the ISO 10918-3 (JTIP standard) and it enables visualization of images and zooming facilities avoiding display artefacts, and screen memory bottlenecks. AHYDS has probably been the first project to include the high performance JTIP technology in a database server.
The AHYDS platform and these joint efforts have been demonstrated at the 1998 International Conference of Data Engineering(ICDE'98) in Orlando, Florida, 23-24 February 1998, and also the EVA-GIFU'98 Conference, Gifu, Japan, 6-10 April 1998.
Prof. Asanee Kawtrakul and the NAIST (NAtural language processing and Intelligent information System Technology) of Kasetsart University, Thailand is providing a good deal of expertise to AHYDS in term of Natural Language Processing and retrieval to benefit from the innovative data storage system and uniform architecture. It is a part of extensive cooperation to provide a very large scale cultural heritage information system. [Fig.1]
Users get what they are looking for
A user is satisfied when he can get what he is looking for in a reasonable time. A large scale hypermedia delivery system needs to share information over many distributed servers, through different types of networks with various bandwidth. The web or online systems provide many good things but still lack of QoS dynamic management. The AHYDS platform provides QoS management using multi-agent technology for continuous media [Fig.2.]
Users view information as they want to visualize them
Every user has his own preference in terms of tools to access and to visualize data. He is pleased to see data according to his own mind, following his idea and freedom. AHYDS tackles this issue in providing a dynamic interface and a set of user data models and data representations [Fig.3.]
The new dream
As traditional information systems are trying to integrate cyberspace support for old architecture and closed systems, new kind of systems for hypermedia delivery are being developed. The AHYDS platform is one of them. One plus of AHYDS is its customizable feature to meet new user requirements and evolution of the environment in term of scale, computer, system, etc.
A cardinal feature of the AHYDS is its ability to adapt itself to manage large, complex collections of documents. The plus of such a system is the integration into the cyberspace and the management of active and intelligent user profiles. The update of information over the system according to each specific user profile needs to be notified to the users. This property is crucial as the cyberspace is expending.
The influence on daily life -Networked Education Support to Graduate Students in Thailand-
What about an educational support using active hypermedia delivery systems as a multi-purpose encyclopedia in training ? In parallel to the AHYDS project, a distance learning program in supporting higher education through the SINET-ThaiSarn international link including both broadcast tutorial or practice training was launched April 1998 in order to provide advanced training on the AHYDS technology. [Fig.4]
The lecture over Internet includes 15 sessions of 2 1/2 hours (40 hours). The lecture is a part of the cooperation between Professor Asanee Kawtrakul (Kasetsart University-NaiST Laboratory), Professor K. Ono (NACSIS, Director of the R&D department), and Dr. F. Andres (NACSIS visiting researcher). Two invited talks were included inside the tutorial framework:
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For Further Information AHYDS Project Home Page: http://www.rd.nacsis.ac.jp/~andres/db/ahyds.html E-mail: ono@rd.nacsis.ac.jp |