A griotte in West African culture is a female professional storyteller, responsible for preserving a tribe's history and genealogy by relaying its folklore in oral and musical recitations. Similarly, Griotte is an interdisciplinary project that seeks to foster collaboration between tradition bearers, subject experts, and computer specialists in an effort to build high quality digital oral history collections. To accomplish this objective, this project preserves the primary strength of oral history, namely its ability to disclose "our" intangible culture, and addresses its primary criticism, namely its dubious reliability due to reliance on human memory and integrity. For a theoretical foundation and a systematic model, William Moss's work on the evidentiary value of historical sources is employed. Using his work as a conceptual framework, along with Semantic Web technologies (e.g. Topic Maps and ontologies), a demonstrator system is developed to provide digital oral history tools to a "sample" of the target audience(s). This demonstrator system is evaluated via two methods: 1) a case study conducted to employ the system in the actual building of a digital oral history collection (this step also created sample data for the following assessment), and 2) a survey which involved a task-based evaluation of the demonstrator system. The results of the survey indicate that integrating oral histories with documentary evidence increases the evidentiary value of oral histories. Furthermore, the results imply that individuals are more likely to use oral histories in their work if their evidentiary value is increased. The contributions of this research – primarily in the area of organizing metadata on the World Wide Web – and considerations for future research are also provided.

Šiuo metu informacija yra sukaupta paskirstytuose šaltiniuose, kurie kaip saugojimo priemonę naudoja duomenų bazes. Šios bazės yra skirtingų tipų. Vartotojo tikslas yra naudoti keletą nepriklausomų informacijos šaltinių kaip vieną. Dėl savo nepriklausomumo nuo DBVS ir platformos tipo, XML tapo ypatingai naudingas atviroms susisiekiančioms sistemoms, kuomet duomenys apsikeičiami tarp paskirstytų duomenų šaltinių. Šiame darbe pateikiamas ontologijų, kaip dalykinės srities apibrėžimo informacijos paieškai, panaudojimas. Tai leidžia optimizuoti reikiamos informacijos paieškos procesą ir išvengti užklausos rezultatų pertekliškumo. / The main problem in heterogeneous database integration is data incompatibility in different databases. XML is perfect solution in data exchange between different databases as it is independent from OS, applications or hardware. To implement XML in data exchange XML must be created corresponding to the databases. This work propose use of ontologies for information retrieving from heterogenous data bases. Such method let optimize user query to avoid wasted information.

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The dissemination of various types of data faces ongoing challenges with the growing need of accessing manifold information. Since the interest in content is what drives data networks, some new technologies and thoughts attempt to cope with these challenges by developing content-based rather than address-based architectures. The Publish/ Subscribe paradigm can be a promising approach toward content-based data dissemination, especially that it provides total decoupling between publishers and subscribers. However, in content-based publish/subscribe systems, subscriptions are expressive and the information is often delivered based on the matched expressive content - which may not deeply alleviate considerable performance challenges. This dissertation explores a hardware solution for disseminating data in content-based publish/subscribe systems. This solution consists of an efficient hardware architecture of an XML/XPath broker that can route information based on content to either other XML/XPath brokers or to ultimate users. A network of such brokers represent an overlay structure for XML content-based publish/subscribe data dissemination systems. Each broker can simultaneously process many XPath subscriptions, efficiently parse XML publications, and subsequently forward notifications that result from high-performance matching processes. In the core of the broker architecture, locates an XML parser that utilizes a novel Skeleton CAM-Based XML Parsing (SCBXP) technique in addition to an XPath processor and a high-performance matching engine. Moreover, the broker employs effective mechanisms for content-based routing, so as subscriptions, publications, and notifications are routed through the network based on content. The inherent reconfigurability feature of the broker’s hardware provides the system architecture with the capability of residing in any FPGA device of moderate logic density. Furthermore, such a system-on-chip architecture is upgradable, if any future hardware add-ons are needed. However, the current architecture is mature and can effectively be implemented on an ASIC device. Finally, this thesis presents and analyzes the experiments conducted on an FPGA prototype implementation of the proposed broker/router. The experiments tackle tests for the SCBXP alone and for two phases of development of the whole broker. The corresponding results indicate the high performance that the involved parsing, storing, matching, and routing processes can achieve.

Investments on multimedia technology enable us to store many more reflections of the real world in digital world as videos. By recording videos about real world entities, we carry a lot of information to the digital world directly. In order to store and efficiently query this information, a video database system (VDBS) is necessary. In this thesis work, we propose a structural, event based and multimodal (SEBM) video data model for VDBSs. SEBM video data model supports three different modalities that are visual, auditory and textual modalities and we propose that we can dissolve these three modalities with a single SEBM video data model. This proposal is supported by the interpretation of the video data by human. Hence we can answer the content based, spatio-temporal and fuzzy queries of the user more easily, since we store the video data as the way that s/he interprets the real world data. We follow divide and conquer technique when answering very complicated queries. We have implemented the SEBM video data model in a Java based system that uses XML for representing the SEBM data model and Berkeley XML DBMS for storing the data based on the SEBM prototype system.

ViewPlus is collaborating with the American Physical Society (APS), DAISY, and several other companies and agencies to enable APS to publish its scientific journals in the highly accessible DAISY XML format. All text, math, and figures will be accessible to everybody, including people with print disabilities. The first experimental APS DAISY publications are targeted for 2010. All APS journals will eventually be published in DAISY form, and other scholarly publishers are expected to follow suit.

Large scale production of accessible media above and beyond DAISY Talking Books requires management of the workflow from the initial scan to the output of the media production. DAISY Producer was created to help manage this process. It tracks the transformation of hard copy or electronic content to DTBook XML at any stage of the workflow and interfaces to existing order processing systems. Making use of DAISY Pipeline and Liblouis, DAISY Producer fully automates the generation of on-demand, user-specific DAISY Talking Books, Large Print and Braille. This paper introduces DAISY Producer and shows how creators of accessible media can benefit from this open source tool.

As result of the Contrapunctus European project the design of the Braille Music Mark-up as an XML representation of a music scores in Braille has been carried out. We propose a design of a prototype system for translating these kinds of files into spoken music encoded in DAISYXML. In this way any blind musician may be able to memorize any Braille score using a DAISY reader. Therefore the dependency of reading BMML files in front of a computer would be eliminated. This is a first work on feasibility which will be improved and managed by a working group.

Only two percent of new books released in Germany are professionally edited for visually impaired people. However, more and more print publications are made available to the public in digital formats through online content delivery platforms like “libreka!”. The automatic conversion of such contents into DAISY would considerably increase the number of publications available in accessible formats. Still, most data available on “libreka!” is published as non-tagged PDF. In this paper, we examine the potential for automatic conversion of “libreka!”-based content into DAISY, while also analyzing the potentials and limitations of current conversion tools.

Bakgrund: Redovisningsbranschen står inför en ny våg av digitalisering som enligt en framtidsrapport från Stiftelsen för Strategisk Forskning har potential att automatisera bort arbetsuppgifterna för nio av tio redovisningsekonomer. Kärnan i denna nya digitaliseringsvåg är standardisering av begrepp och procedurer som gör att behovet av manuell interaktion minskas radikalt. Informationsjättar som Facebook och Google har visat vägen för vad som går att åstadkomma genom att tagga data med beskrivande metadata. Tekniken är redan här och det framstår som något av ett mysterium varför det dröjt så länge innan denna nya informationsteknologi fått genomslag inom revisionsbranschen. Denna uppsats startar med observationen att kontoplanen är en viktig del i den standardisering som krävs för att hantera den nya digitaliseringsvågen. Syfte: Denna uppsats syftar till att belysa temat digitalisering på redovisningsområdet utifrån fallet kontoplanen BAS. Metod: Fallet kontoplanen BAS har studerats med en explorativ kvalitativ fallstudie. Fyra styrelsemedlemmar i föreningen BAS har intervjuats vilket motsvarar halva styrelsen. Utöver detta har två intervjuer gjorts för att belysa de tekniska aspekterna av att översätta konventioner från redovisningspraxis till så kallade taxonomier. Rent tekniska aspekter på programmeringsnivå behandlas översiktlig med utgångspunkt i respondenternas expertis. Resultat: Frivillighet och anpassningsbarhet är viktiga värden hos kontoplanen BAS. Flera respondenter har uttryckt att de befarar att dessa värden kan gå förlorade om kontoplanen skulle standardiseras ytterligare för att passa in i en digital taxonomi. Samtidigt finns också en medvetenhet om att den nuvarande versionen av BAS inte är slutgiltig. Det finns ett behov av att tydliggöra skillnaden mellan flexibla konton och ramkonton som krävs för att redovisningsdata ska kunna användas för att skapa korrekta rapporter till myndigheter. / Background: The accounting industry faces a new wave of digitalization which, according to a future report from the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research, has the potential to automate the work of nine out of ten accountants. The core in this new wave of digitalization is the standardization of concepts and procedures which can reduce the need for manual interaction radically. Information giants like Facebook and Google have shown the way for what can be accomplished by tagging data with descriptive metadata. The technology is already here and it seems like something of a mystery, why it has taken so long before this new information technology gained impact in the accounting industry. This paper starts with the observation that the chart of accounts is an important part of the standardization required to handle the new wave of digitalization. Purpose: This paper aims at describing the theme digitalization in the accounting field, based on the case of the Swedish BAS chart of accounts. Method: The case Swedish BAS has been studied with an explorative qualitative case study. Four board members in the association BAS have been interviewed, which corresponds to half the board. In addition, two interviews have been made to highlight the technical aspects of translating conventions from accounting practices into so-called taxonomies. Pure technical aspects at the programming level are discussed in the light of the respondents' expertise. Results: Voluntary application and adaptability are core values of the Swedish BAS chart of accounts. Several respondents have expressed their fear that these values may be lost if the accounting plan would be further standardized to fit into a digital taxonomy. At the same time, there is also awareness that the current version of BAS is not final. There is a need to clarify the difference between flexible accounts and needed accounts required for accounting data to be used to create accurate reports to the authorities.