The construction of a digital collection from the beginning implies technical decisions such as choosing format and design of documents, the selection of search and browsing mechanisms to access data and metadata, and the use of an architecture which support collaborative work of authors. This paper describes CORTUPP, a digital collection of technical reports. CORTUPP uses REC, an external service to support collaborative labeling and ranking of documents.
Semantic digital libraries refer to systems build upon research on digital libraries,
semantic web, social networking and human computer interaction: they integrate
knowledge organization systems, delivered by classic digital libraries, with the
semantic web and social networking (Web 2.0) technologies [
Authors believe that semantic web technologies can support the development
of valuable collections and services required in educational institutions. The
particular interest is a semantic digital library, that according to [
Although freely distributed software exists around the world to construct semantic digital libraries such as Greenstone 1 or Jerome DL 2, we decided to implement an independent component in order to take into account the work °ows implemented at the UPPuebla. Authors believe that CORTUPP can serve as a basis to construct a semantic digital library for the UPPuebla. 3
CORTUPP collection consists of a database, a web interface, assessment
instruments, a common structure of documents and search mechanisms. This is
available at http://server3.uppuebla.edu.mx/cortupp/. Figure 1 shows the
architecture of our collection. This is an adaptation of an architecture proposed
by [
The content of CORTUPP is formed by technical reports, registers of assessment committees, assessment instruments and calendar of activities. The data about users and count of users are also part of the content. The main users are teachers and students at the UPPuebla that make use of services of access, storage and search. Next sections describe the components of the architecture. 3.1
We propose a common structure of the documents that introduces a common semantic by itself. This structure is formed by the following mandatory chapters: 1)research propose, 2)theoretical marc, 3)research design, 4)implementation, 5)results and 6)conclusions. Support material of the research project such as interviews, questionnaires or large tables can be added in appendixes.
Authors are free to propose the structure of each chapter, except the ¯rst one that refers to the research propose which is formed by the following mandatory sections: introduction, general objective, speci¯c objectives, justi¯cation,
chronogram of activities, hardware and software requirements and scopes and limits of the research project. The document structure has been de¯ned as a Latex template. The BibTex ¯le format is used to create the bibliography 3. A technical report is described itself as a techreport entry. .
We identify internal users that belong to the UPPuebla community, they are students, teachers, managers and sta® of the di®usion department; and external users who are members of another academic communities or visitors of the collection. 3.2
CORTUPP has a web-based interface to access the documents stored at the database, this makes use of hyperlinks to explore documents, to download the assessment instruments or to access to relevant web pages. Technical reports are stored as PDF ¯les in the web server.
At CORTUPP users can carry on two types of searches: 1) keyword-based searches and 2) authority search (search by author or by a participant of the assessment committee). An assessment committee is formed by three teachers who play the role of advisor, secretary and vocal. This committee validates the content of the document. Figure 2 shows the interface of CORTUPP.
CORTUPP uses existing legal metadata in semantically enabled libraries. Technical reports are described with the Dublin Core (DC) elements of Table 1. These elements are associated to the elements of the Latex template. DC element Description Creator Indicates the name of the ¯rst author Date Indicates the delivery date Description Contains the abstract of the technical report Identifier This is a number used to identify the technical report
in the collection Language Language of the content (Spanish) Publisher Contains the name of the university as the entity responsible for publishing the technical report Subject Keywords of the technical report according to a research area Title A given title to the technical report
CORTUPP is represented in a structure called ontology of records that maintain an organization by content. This is a hierarchical structure that provides a unique and unambiguous interpretation of the document elements. This has concept-term relationships useful for search based on free text. The main characteristics of an ontology of records are the following ones: 1. Technical reports are clustered by similarity 2. Clusters in the k -level have labels of k -terms 3. All documents of a cluster share the terms of its label
The features of the ontology of records can be found in [
Adding semantic features for digital collections is a topic of interest in research
areas such as collaborative labeling, web 2.0 and semantic digital libraries. For
example, [
A tag is a keyword that acts like a subject or category for the associated
content [
In social contexts, such as Flickr 4, facebook 5, del.icio.us. 6 and Soboleo 7, traditional measures of information retrieval are not important, else the opinion and experience of previous users. In this sense, we have decided to integrate REC, an open software that allow users of CORTUPP to add tags to take into account subjective information of users.
REC [
REC allow domain experts and members of the community to assign meaning labels to the technical reports of CORTUPP. Using REC, users construct a di®erent organization of the documents. The integration of REC to CORTUPP makes it a community information space through functionality for selection, annotation, authoring/contribution and collaboration.
CORTUPP allows users to reuse the content of documents, the collection integrates research activities of students under the supervision of a team of teachers. This has the following advantages: distribution of assessment instruments, extension of document descriptions with labels. However, there are several challenges in the construction of a semantic digital library such as providing for more usability and inference mechanisms. At the date, CORTUPP can be perceived as a result of collaborative content production at the UPPuebla.
Currently, search services at CORTUPP are keyword-based. As future work, we plan to expand those services in order to have semantic search engines, such engines can be used to improve the quality of keyword-based search engines by taking into account the meaning of the words. We conclude with further possibilities of organization and recommendation that arise from the use of REC.
We thank to the sta® of Programa Acad¶emico de Ingenier¶³a en Inform¶atica at the UPPuebla for their help and cooperation in the construction process. This work is partially supported by PROMEP grant Biblioteca Digital Sem¶antica de Recursos Educativos /103-5/09/4023.