Papers in PDF format

and the 'Top' view for all applications. At this point, suppose we want to explore the recent movie 'Toy Story'. We can
transition from the Top conceptual view to any movie object, such as ‘Toy Story’, by selecting it in the extent list-box
and pressing Return, or simply double-clicking on the movie. After transitioning, the current conceptual state is the
'Toy Story' 'movie object and the current conceptual display is the Toy Story' page [Tab. 4].
There are three main components in this conceptual display: the formal concept display, the conceptual similarity
display, and the metadata display.
• The first column represents the formal concept display: the top list-box contains the intent of the formal concept
generated by the movie object 'Toy Story'; next down is the title of the movie; third is the list-box of more specialized
views; and finally at the bottom is the list-box containing the extent or more specialized objects.
• The bottom two rows represent the conceptual similarity display. Since the current conceptual state is a movie
object, the conceptual similarity is computed in the intentional mode. For example, the similarity between ‘Toy Story’
and the ‘The Lion King’ is 6, meaning that ‘Toy Story’ and ‘The Lion King’ share 6 attributes in common. From the
‘Toy Story’ page you can see that of the 250 movies which are in the database, 'Babe', 'Beauty and the Beast', 'Aladdin'
and 'Nightmare before Christmas' are the most similar to 'Toy Story' (they share 7 out of 11 attributes). On the other
hand, movies which have no attributes in common with 'Toy Story' include 'Casablanca' and 'Citizen Kane', etc.
• The text-box in the top right represents the metadata display. In order to get a generic format for any application
and any object-type, we intend to interpret metadata as the description of a bibliographic entity or work. A generic
form for this is provided by the ISBD (International Standard Bibliographic Description) consisting of 8 areas: (1) title
and statement of responsibility; (2) edition; (3) material (or type of publication) specific details; (4) publication,
distribution etc.; (5) physical description; (6) series; (7) note; and (8) standard number and terms of availability. The
standard number corresponds to the URL field in [Tab.4], which points to the actual digital object.
Summary and Future Work
The WAVE navigator implementation has currently an off-line demonstration conceptual browser running over
applications for movies, music, etc. We are currently experimenting with functionality and usability. During the next
year we will be experimenting with the scaleability issue, both in the sense of larger databases and in the sense of an
on-line client/server architecture. Both on-going and future work can be discussed in terms of three processes for the
conceptualization of networked information resources: metadata abstraction, conceptual scaling, and conceptual
linkage [Kent & Neuss 1996a]. The first process, metadata abstraction (also called summarization, gathering, or
synopsizing), is often implemented as the first (back) component of a NIDR system. An important example of a
metadata abstraction processor is the gatherer component of the Harvest system [Bowman et al. 1994a]. The third
process, conceptual linkage, is now being implemented as the first phase of the WAVE system development. This
phase replaces the broker indexing component of the Harvest system, extending broker capabilities by adding dynamic
and customizable knowledge organization techniques. It is being used for interactive information analysis and
browsing guidance during exploratory search by client Web browsers over a community's information space. The
second process, conceptual scaling, will be implemented as the second phase of WAVE system development. This
phase will represent the process of faceted analysis which occurs in library science classification. It also corresponds to
the design of user interest profiles in current awareness services [Rowley 1987].
References
[Barnard et al. 1995] Barnard, D., Burnard, L., DeRose, S., Durand, D., & Sperberg-McQueen, C. (1995). Lessons for
the World Wide Web from the Text Encoding Initiative. Proceedings of the Fourth International World Wide Web
Conference, December 1995, Boston. 349-357.
[Bowman 1996] Bowman, C.M., (1996). The Synopsis File System: Information Management in Wide-Area File
Systems. Presented at the Decorum’96 conference, February 1996, Tarpon Springs, Florida.