ABSTRACT

BROWSING AROUND A DIGITAL LIBRARY

Prof. Ian Witten Department of Computer Science, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

What will it be like to work in the digital library of the future? We begin by browsing around an experimental digital library of the present, glancing at some collections and seeing how they are organized. Then we look to the future. Although present digital libraries are quite like conventional libraries, we argue that future ones will feel qualitatively different. Readers--and writers--will work in the library using a kind of context- directed browsing. This will be supported by structures derived from automatic analysis of the contents of the library--not just the catalogue, or abstracts, but the full text of the books and journals--using new techniques of data mining.

About the Speaker:
Ian H. Witten is professor of computer science at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand. He directs the New Zealand Digital Library research project. His research interests include information retrieval, machine learning, text compression, and programming by demonstration. He has published widely in these areas, including six books. The most recent are Managing gigabytes: Compressing and indexing documents and images (second edition, Morgan Kaufmann, 1999) and Data mining: practical machine learning tools and techniques with Java implementations (Morgan Kaufmann, 2000). He received an MA in mathematics from Cambridge Unversity; an MSc in computer science from the University of Calgary, Canada; and a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Essex. He is a fellow of the ACM and of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Maintained by rbennett@cs.ucl.ac.uk