Creation, Management and Publication of Digital Documents Using Standard Components on the Internet
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Von der Carl-Friedrich-Gauß-Fakultät für Mathematik und Informatik der Technischen Universität Braunschweig genehmigte Dissertation zur Erlangung des Grades eines Doktor-Ingenieurs (Dr.-Ing.) CREATION, MANAGEMENT AND PUBLICATION OF DIGITAL DOCUMENTS USING STANDARD COMPONENTS ON THE INTERNET Marco Zens Datum der mündlichen Prüfung: 17. November 2006 1. Referent Prof. Dr. Dieter W. Fellner 2. Referent Prof. Dr. Hermann Maurer eingereicht am: 16. August 2004 Abstract Today, digital documents play a steadily increasing role within our society. The Internet as well as the World Wide Web, offering the opportunity for easy and effi- cient distributed collaboration, additionally speed up this process. It is therefore as much promising as necessary to develop, to implement and to evaluate new systems to support workflows based on digital documents and Web technology. However, it is important not only to replace traditional (e.g. paper-based) workflows with their electronic counterpart, but also to improve them by exploiting the new possibilities. In this thesis, following an introduction to the field of digital documents and digital libraries, three consecutive application scenarios about the successful appli- cation of digital workflows will be presented. First, the research project Golden- Gate focuses on the creation of and the access to structured documents. Then, the project EG Online is discussed as an example scenario for information and dis- tributed collaboration with the help of Web Services. Finally, the results from the research project Managing Conference Proceedings are presented, which imple- ments a complete electronic creation, managing and publication workflow based on digital documents, using ideas and techniques developed during the previous two projects. All these projects have led to new systems and procedures which were and still are used successfully in different environments. For example EG Online is the cen- tral tool in the daily work of the Eurographics Association and several large scien- tific conferences as well as workshops are supported by the MCP system every year. The presentation and the discussion of the achieved results and of the experiences gained form a major part of this work. ii Zusammenfassung Heutzutage spielen digitale Dokumente in unserer Gesellschaft eine ständig zuneh- mende Rolle. Das Internet und das World Wide Web beschleunigen diesen Prozess noch zusätzlich, in dem sie die Gelegenheit für eine einfache und doch effizien- te Zusammenarbeit von verteilten Standorten aus bieten. Es ist daher ebenso viel versprechend wie auch notwendig, neue Systeme zu entwickeln, zu implementie- ren und zu evaluieren, welche auf digitalen Dokumenten und auf Web-Technologie basierende Workflow-Prozesse unterstützen können. Es ist jedoch wichtig, traditio- nelle (also z.B. auf Papier basierende) Arbeitsprozesse nicht einfach nur durch ihre elektronischen Gegenstücke zu ersetzen, sondern sie auch durch die Ausnutzung der neuen Möglichkeiten zu verbessern. Im Rahmen dieser Dissertation werde ich, nach einer Einführung in das Gebiet der digitalen Dokumente und der digitalen Bibliotheken, drei aufeinander aufbau- ende Anwendungsszenarien zum erfolgreichen Einsatz digitaler Workflows vorstel- len. Zunächst konzentriert sich das Forschungsprojekt GoldenGate auf die Erstel- lung und auf den Zugriff auf strukturierte Dokumente. Im Anschluss wird das EG Online-Projekt diskutiert, das als beispielhaftes Szenario zur Verbreitung von Infor- mationen und zur verteilten Zusammenarbeit, beides unter Verwendung von Web Services, dient. Schließlich werden die Resultate des Forschungsprojekts Mana- ging Conference Proceedings präsentiert, in dessen Verlauf ein vollständig elektro- nischer Erzeugungs-, Verwaltungs- und Publikationsprozess implementiert worden ist. Dabei werden vor allem Techniken und Ideen verwendet, die in den zwei vor- hergehenden Projekten entwickelt wurden. Alle diese Projekte haben zu neuen Systemen und Prozeduren geführt, welche in unterschiedlichen Umgebungen erfolgreich eingesetzt wurden und auch noch einge- setzt werden. So ist z.B. EG Online das zentrale Werkzeug in der täglichen Arbeit der Eurographics Association und mehrere große, wissenschaftliche Konferenzen sowie Workshops werden jedes Jahr durch das MCP-System unterstützt. Die Dar- stellung sowie die Diskussion der erzielten Ergebnisse und der gewonnenen Erfah- rungen bilden einen großen Anteil dieser Arbeit. iii Acknowledgments I would like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who supported me during the last years and contributed to the research projects discussed or to this thesis itself, be it with helpful comments, with long hours of programming, with encouragement or patience. At first, I have to mention my supervisor Dieter Fellner who gave me the chance to work on such interesting projects. Without his ideas, his knowledge, his comments and his continuing support the results presented here would not have been accomplished. Additionally, I want to explicitly thank all current and former members of the Digital Library Lab and the Computer Graphics Group in Bonn and later in Braunschweig, especially René Berndt (for contributing essential parts to all three projects), Carsten Oberscheid (for his outstanding work during GoldenGate) and Thomas Günther (for proof-reading this thesis, together with René). Also I acknowledge the funding and the cooperation of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for GoldenGate, the support of the BMBF for Managing Conference Proceedings and the helpful comments of numerous members of the Eurographics Association who have to “live” with the EG Online system which we implemented. Last but not least, a sincere “Thank you!” goes to my parents, my friends and especially to Heike for her patience and for her subtle ways to drive me on. ;-) iv Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgments iv Contents v 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Motivation . 1 1.2 Thesis Contribution . 1 1.3 Thesis Outline . 2 2 Digital Documents 3 2.1 Document Formats . 3 2.1.1 Generalized Documents . 3 2.1.2 Structure & Presentation . 5 2.1.3 Textformats . 7 2.1.4 Formats for Non-textual Documents . 11 2.1.5 Extensible Markup Language . 15 2.1.6 Metadata . 18 2.2 Creation of Digital Documents . 21 2.2.1 Retro-Digitization . 21 2.2.2 Creation of New Documents . 23 2.2.3 Electronic Added Value . 25 2.3 Access to Digital Documents . 27 2.3.1 Searching (and Finding) . 28 2.3.2 Storage . 30 2.4 Summary . 32 3 GoldenGate 35 3.1 Introduction . 35 3.2 Electronic Workflow of Documents . 36 3.2.1 Common Features of Information Management Systems . 36 3.2.2 Hyperwave Information Server . 38 3.2.3 Modeling Information Management with Standard Components . 40 3.2.4 Bringing it all Together: GoldenGate . 42 3.3 Implementation Details . 43 3.3.1 Submitting a Grant Proposal . 45 3.3.2 Dynamic & Static Views . 47 3.3.3 XML Up-Translation . 54 3.4 Results & Experiences . 57 v vi CONTENTS 3.4.1 Extension of the Prototype . 58 3.4.2 Real-Life Usage . 60 3.5 Summary . 64 4 EG Online 66 4.1 From Web Pages to Web Services . 66 4.1.1 Short History of EG Online . 67 4.1.2 Results, Experiences and Extensions . 68 4.2 EG Online Today . 71 4.2.1 Membership DB . 71 4.2.2 Publications . 75 4.2.3 Document Archives . 76 4.2.4 Mailing Lists & Aliases . 77 4.2.5 EG Digital Library . 78 4.2.6 EG Job Center . 84 4.3 Technical Details . 85 4.4 Summary . 87 5 Managing Conference Proceedings 88 5.1 Introduction . 88 5.2 Conference Support Software and Systems . 90 5.3 Global Info . 92 5.4 The MCP System . 94 5.4.1 Basic Idea . 94 5.4.2 Workflow Elements . 96 5.4.3 Pre-Press Production . 101 5.4.4 Applications, Advances & Experiences . 104 5.4.5 The Future . 108 5.5 Complete Example Run . 109 5.6 Summary . 117 6 Conclusion 121 6.1 Thesis Summary . 121 6.2 Future Work . 122 List of Figures 125 List of Tables 126 Bibliography 132 Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Motivation Today, digital documents play a major role in our society, with their importance steadily increasing. With the World Wide Web spreading like wildfire, with the wide usage of email or electronic messaging services and with networked computers being placed in almost every office or private home, digital documents have become a central issue for academia, industry and society at large. But one will be confronted with uncertainness as soon as one asks for the definition of an “electronic document” or if one only wants to know what kind of requirements it has to fulfill in order to be superior to a printed document. It all starts with trivial questions like “What is a document?” or “In what format should it be stored?”. The answers to the these questions immediately lead to more issues which need to be discussed. When preparing a concept for a system which is to use digital documents, one soon recognizes that many questions arise from the simple idea of storing a specific information in a document. Important problems are, for example, the structure of the content, the syntax to represent it and to what file format this can be mapped to – it is only much later that one asks for the optical (or acoustical etc.) appearance of the document, the so-called presentation. This rather quickly leads to sophisticated techniques for the storage of documents and even more important techniques for the retrieval of and the access to these documents. A quite crucial question is also how such a document is created in the first place and how it is published, if required. The field of research named Digital Libraries, as a part of Computer Science (but also Library Sci- ence, Media Science and so on) deals with these and other important issues. It is important to stress that Digital Library (or DL) is neither only a synonym for the electronic version of a bookshelf nor an institution owning many digital books (which is one aspect, of course).