This thesis explores the topic of convergence of descriptive systems between different cultural heritage institutions — libraries, archives and museums. The primary purpose of integrated descriptive systems is to enable researchers to access cultural heritage information through one portal. Beginning with definitions of each type of cultural heritage institution and a historical overview of their evolution, the thesis then provides an analysis of similarities and differences between these institutions with respect to purpose, procedures, and perspective. The latter half of the thesis first provides a historical overview of each discipline’s descriptive practices with a brief comparative analysis before discussing various methods by which these institutions can create integrated descriptive systems. The overall emphasis is on complementary similarities between the institutions and the potential for cross-sectoral collaboration that these similarities enable. The conclusion of the thesis is that creating integrated descriptive systems is desirable and well within current technological capabilities.

This project examines the corpus of novels that have been nominated for the Man Booker Prize and, using the prize as a creator of a contemporary literary canon, attempts to develop a model of a contemporary best text. Using the distant reading techniques proposed by digital humanities scholar Franco Moretti to track and graph a variety of formal and structural variables across the corpus of nominees, it becomes apparent that the kind of novel that typically wins the Booker Prize and thus the kind of novel that qualifies as a contemporary best text fits a distinct mold. These novels are solemn, serious texts written by British or Irish men, and the stories they tell concern young British or Irish men struggling, often alone, in pain, and under the threat of impending age, through a brutal, violent, and amoral world.

Achieving high compression ratio without significant loss of quality is the main goal of the most standard video coding systems. Since consecutive frames of a general video sequence have high correlations, the temporal redundancy between frames is removed by using motion estimation and motion compensation techniques. In this thesis, we investigate the use of video content information within the video coding system and propose a new video coding approach that can save significant bit-rates of the compressed video. Main units of the proposed coding scheme include the scene analyzer and image interpolator. The scene analyzer at the encoder extracts scene-modeling parameters from input sequences. The image interpolator at the decoder reconstructs the video frames by using the transmitted modeling parameters. The scene analyzer consists of the camera motion detector and image-matching module. We propose a new camera motion detection method that directly analyzes the 2-D distribution of inter-frame motion fields. Experimental results show that the proposed method provides higher detection accuracy and faster computation time than the 1-D angle histogram-based method. A robust image-matching method that is invariant to scale changes, rotations, and illumination changes has been presented. Invariance to these changes is achieved by adopting mutual information as a measure of similarity and adaptively changing the size and orientation of the local matching windows. To reduce ambiguities of the local matching, a global matching technique has been combined with the local matching. To evaluate the performance of the proposed coding scheme, we have integrated the camera motion detector, the image-matching module, and the image interpolator with the standard MPEG-4 video codec. We compare our method with the standard MPEG-4 codec in terms of bit rates, computation time, and subjective and objective qualities.

Information quality corresponds to the degree of excellence in communicating knowledge or intelligence and encompasses aspects of validity, accuracy, reliability, bias, transparency, and comprehensiveness among others. Professional news, public relations, and user generated content alike all have their own subtly different information quality concerns. With so much recent growth in online video, it is also apparent that more and more consumers will be getting their information from online videos and that understanding the information quality of video becomes paramount for a consumer wanting to make decisions based on it. This dissertation explores the design and evaluation of collaborative video annotation and presentation interfaces as motivated by the desire for better information quality in online video. We designed, built, and evaluated three systems: (1) Audio Puzzler, a puzzle game which as a by-product of play produces highly accurate time-stamped transcripts of video, (2) Videolyzer, a video annotation system designed to aid bloggers and journalists collect, aggregate, and share analyses of information quality of video, and (3) Videolyzer CE, a simplified video annotation presentation which syndicates the knowledge collected using Videolyzer to a wider range of users in order to modulate their perceptions of video information. We contribute to knowledge of different interface methods for collaborative video annotation and to mechanisms for enhancing accuracy of objective metadata such as transcripts as well as subjective notions of information quality of the video itself.

No description available.

The spatial data community relies on the quality of its data. This research investigates new ways of storing and retrieving spatial data quality information in databases. Given the importance of features and sub-feature variation, three different data quality models of spatial variation in quality have been identified and defined: per-feature, feature-independent and feature-hybrid. Quality information is stored against each feature in the per-feature model. In the feature-independent model, quality information is independent of the feature. The feature-hybrid is derived from a combination of the other two models. In general, each model of spatial variation is different in its representational and querying capabilities. However, no model is entirely superior in storing and retrieving spatially varying quality. Hence, an integrated data model called as RDBMS for Spatial Variation in Quality (RSVQ) was developed by integrating per-feature, feature-independent and feature-hybrid data quality models. The RSVQ data model provides flexible representation of SDQ, which can be stored alongside individual features or parts of features in the database, or as an independent spatial data layer. / The thesis reports on how Oracle 10g spatial RDBMS was used to implement this model. An investigation into the different querying mechanisms resulted in the development of a new WITHQUALITY keyword as an extension to SQL. The WITHQUALITY keyword has been designed in such a way that it can perform automatic query optimization, which leads to faster retrieval of quality when compared to existing query mechanism. A user interface was built using Oracle Forms 10g which enables the user to perform single and multiple queries in addition to conversion between models (example, per-feature to feature-independent). The evaluation, which includes an industry case study, shows how these techniques can improve the spatial data community’s ability to represent and record data quality information.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wollongong, 2006. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references: leaf 297-321.

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2008. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 77-88).

Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Waikato, 2008. / Title from PDF cover (viewed April 3, 2009) Includes bibliographical references (p. 95-100)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2004. / Advisor: Dr. Kathleen Burnett, Florida State University, School of Information Studies. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Jan. 13, 2005). Includes bibliographical references.