Research

Research projects

(2006-2007) CRAV: Consulta Real em Ambiente Virtual

The CRAV project is being developed jointly by the OPorto's Regional Archive and the University of Minho and aims at building a technological infrastructure for delivering online services to the archive's customers.

Related sites: Arquivo Distrital do Porto

(2006-2008) RODA: Repositório de Objectos Digitais Autênticos

The RODA project is being developed by the National Archives (Directorate-General of the Portuguese Archives) and the University of Minho and aims at raising awareness within public administration institutions on the issues of digital preservation.

Additionally, this project will produce a digital repository system capable of preseverving authentic digital objects. After its conclusion the National Archives will be able to ingest digital objects (e.g. still images, relational databases, text documents) produced by associated public institutions.

Publications:

Faria, L., Ferreira, M., Castro, R., et. al (2009). RODA : a service-oriented repository to preserve authentic digital objects. International Conference on Open Repositories (OR09), Atlanta, USA. [article]

Ramalho, J. C., Ferreira, M., Faria, L., Castro, R., Barbedo, F., & Corujo, L. (2008). RODA and CRiB - A Service-Oriented Digital Repository. Paper presented at the International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (iPRES), London, UK. [paper]

Ramalho, J. C., Ferreira, M., Faria, L., & Castro, R. (2007). Relational Database Preservation through XML modelling. Paper presented at the Extreme Markup Languages 2007, Montréal, Québec, Canada. [paper]

Barbedo, F., Corujo, L., Faria, L., Castro, R., Ferreira, M., & Ramalho, J. C. (2007). RODA: Repositório de Objectos Digitais Autênticos. Paper presented at the 9º Congresso Nacional de Bibliotecários, Arquivistas e Documentalistas, Ponta Delgada, Portugal. [paper|presentation]

Related sites : RODA Project Web site

(2005-2008) CRiB: Conversion and Recommendation of Digital Object Formats

The CRiB system is a service oriented architecture (SOA) being supported by Web services’ technology which will enable institutions to carry out effective long-term preservation of digital materials. The system will provide the following set of activities:

Conversion of digital objects from near obsolete formats to up-to-date encodings that most users will be able to interpret;
Evaluation of migrations outcome by comparing the original digital object with its converted counterpart and identifying the significant properties that have not been adequately preserved;
Generation of migration reports in appropriate forms for inclusion in the preservation metadata of the migrated object;
Generation of suggestions of best suitable migration alternatives taking into consideration the preservation requirements of the client institution;

Publications:

Ferreira, M. (2009). Preservação de longa-duração de informação digital no contexto de um Arquivo Histórico. Tese de Doutoramento, Universidade do Minho, Guimarães. [thesis]

Becker, C., Ferreira, M., Kraxner, M., Rauber, A., Baptista, A. A., & Ramalho, J. C. (2008). Distributed Preservation Services: Integrating Planning and Actions. Paper presented at the European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL), Aarhus, Denmark. [paper]

Ferreira, M., Baptista, A. A., & Ramalho, J. C. (2007). An intelligent decision support system for digital preservation. International Journal on Digital Libraries, 6(4), 295-304. [paper][preprint]

Ferreira, M., Baptista, A. A. & Ramalho, J. C. (2006). A Foundation for Automatic Digital Preservation. Ariadne(48). [paper]

Ferreira, M. (2006). Automatic Evaluation of Migration Quality in Distributed Networks of Converters. Bulletin of the IEEE Technical Committee on Digital Libraries (TCDL), 2(2). [paper]

Ferreira, M., Baptista, A. A. & Ramalho, J. C. (2006). CRiB: A service oriented architecture for digital preservation outsourcing. Paper presented at the XATA - XML: Aplicações e Tecnologias Associadas, Portalegre, Portugal. [paper]

Ferreira, M., Baptista, A. A. & Ramalho, J. C. (2005). Avaliação Automática de Migração em Redes Distribuídas de Conversores. Paper presented at the Conferência da Associação Portuguesa de Sistemas de Informação (CAPSI), Bragança, Portugal. [paper]

Ferreira, M. (2005). Automatic Evaluation of Migration Quality in Distributed Networks of Converters. Communication given at the Doctoral Consortium of the 9th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL), Vienna, Austria. [paper]

(2004) Dspace-Dev @ University of Minho

Dspace related activities at University of Minho started in April 2003 and since then many developments have been made. DSpace-Dev @ University of Minho is a website that was created with the purpose of making public some of these developments.

The first step has been taken by the University of Minho Documentation Services (SDUM) with the translation of the DSpace system to Portuguese and its implementation in the RepositóriUM, the institutional repository of this university, created to store, preserve and disseminate it's intellectual output. This version has been downloaded for use in many other institutions in Portugal and Brazil.

This same version served as a basis for the Papadocs system. Papadocs intends to store and provide access to all assignments made by the Information Systems’ department students. Some changes had to be made to the original version, in particular in what concerns the metadata.

The Papadocs project allowed us to experiment with DSpace resulting in the development of new features that enhance DSpace functionality:

An add-on for Commenting resources;
A Recommendation add-on that provides suggestions of relevant reading material to the user;
A 3D browsing environment based on VRML that allows the identification of special relationships between users, items, comments, etc - the Web of Communication;
An add-on that enhances DSpace with Controlled Vocabulary functionalities

The ACM Computer Classification System (version 1998) was adapted and integrated with the Controlled Vocabularies Add-on. Our derivative version of the ACM Computer Classification System can be downloaded here.

In this site we present these initiatives and discuss the related research projects currently in hands. All the source-code can be downloaded in this site.

Parallel to that was created LusoDSpace, a website intended to provide information about the DSpace platform to the Portuguese speaking community.

Publications:

Baptista, A. A., & Ferreira, M. (2007). Tea for Two - Bringing Informal Communication to Repositories. D-Lib Magazine, 13(5/6). [paper]

Baptista, A. A., & Ferreira, M. (2006). Repository Conversations. Brazillian Journal of Information Science, 0(0), 47-60. [paper]

Ferreira, M. & Baptista, A. A. (2005). DSpace-Dev @ University of Minho - Development of tools and add-ons for the DSpace platform. Communication given at the DSpace Federation 2nd User Group meeting, Cambridge, UK. [abstract|presentation]

Ferreira, M. & Baptista, A. A. (2005). The use of Taxonomies as a way to achieve Interoperability and improved Resource Discovery in DSpace-based Repositories. Paper presented at the XATA - XML: Aplicações e Tecnologias Associadas, Vila Verde, Braga, Portugal. [paper]

(2003) DigitArq

Over time, novel and richer finding aids are adopted by Archives, while at the same time, indexes, lists, inventories, catalogues and transference guides are produced to better serve the needs of its customers. Although these finding aids help users and archivists attain the artefacts they seek, they comprise a heterogeneous universe extremely hard to manage. The lack of coherence between most finding aids makes updating information a nightmare. To put an end to this scenario, it was carried out at the Arquivo Distrital do Porto (ADP) a project called DigitArq whose major goal was to homogenise the entire collection of finding aids and serve as a first attempt at the edification of a Digital Archive.

This project comprised several stages. The first one consisted in the conversion of a series of paper-based documents and digital databases containing different types of finding aids to a single digital format based on an international standard - the General International Standard Archival Description - Digitalisation and Migration.

The second stage of the project aimed at constructing a centralised database to store all the collected finding aids and developing special purpose software to manage all that information - Archival Management Software.

A third stage consisted in the development of a search engine that allowed Internet users to find and browse the collections - Search Engine.

Preservation is another great responsibility of an Archive. Different techniques can be used to address this issue such as microfilming and digitalisation. The ADP already provided a digitalisation service to their customers, which allowed them to buy digital copies of books and documents. This service was provided in an ad-hoc basis without a well-defined plan or workflow. Document images were kept on CD-ROMs, which where difficult to maintain and preserve. This setting was becoming unbearable given that a lot of images where not saved for future use due to the inherent difficulties in their retrieval.

Since finding aids were now going to be published online it made sense to develop software to allow archivists to publish document images as well. This software should be able to simplify the digitalisation process (using digitalisation profiles) and guarantee the long-term preservation of the digital objects and the media involved. Such a system opens new opportunities for business, as images can be sold online to customers all over the world - Digital Objects Management Software.

Publications:

Ferros, L., Ramalho, J. C., & Ferreira, M. (2008). Creating a National Federation of Archives using OAI-PMH. Paper presented at the XATA - XML, Aplicações e Tecnologias Associadas, Évora, Portugal. [paper soon]

Ramalho, J. C., & Ferreira, M. (2006). Digitarq 2 - Nova plataforma aplicacional para gestão de Arquivos Definitivos. Paper presented at the 2nd International Conference on Enterprise Archives (2ª Conferência Internacional de Arquivos Empresariais), Seixal, Portugal. [paper]

Ferreira, M. (2006). Três anos depois…uma reflexão sobre o projecto DigitArq. A seminar given to the Licenciatura em Ciência da Informação of Faculdade de Letras of University of Porto. Porto, Portugal. [presentation]

Ferreira, M. & Ramalho, J. C. (2004). DigitArq: Creating a Historical Digital Archive. Paper presented at the 5ª Conferência da Associação Portuguesa de Sistemas de Informação, Lisboa. [paper]

Ferreira, M. & Ramalho, J. C. (2004). DigitArq - Creating and Managing a Digital Archive. Paper presented at the ICCC/IFIP International Conference on Electronic Publishing, Brasília, Brazil. [paper]

Ferreira, M. & Ramalho, J. C. (2004). Aquisição e Armazenamento de Metainformação no Contexto de um Arquivo. Paper presented at the XATA - XML: Aplicações e Tecnologias Associadas, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, Portugal. [paper]

(2002) Phenom

The trailblazing Perceptive Home Environments (PHENOM) project is part of Philips long-term research plans for the connected home - an environment that is both aware of the identity of everything within it and the intentions of its users. The PHENOM project is playing an integral role in understanding how people interact with electronic devices, by linking RFID tagged objects to home media content, such as photographs and music.

An integral part of the PHENOM project is the development of a memory browsing system capable of helping users to retrieve, share, and recollect past events. The current focus of the project is to enable convenient access to stored digital picture albums - which may contain a variety of images such as holiday snaps, wedding pictures, sentimental pictures of relatives and other happy memories - as well as displaying the retrieved pictures at the highest possible quality.

A number of key connectivity and identification solutions are required to provide access to a household's complete personal photograph archive and instantly display the selected photos in an intuitive manner. For example, a model of the Eiffel Tower could be the key to accessing holiday snaps from a trip to Paris.

The PHENOM system appeals to users, with its ease of use and ability to adapt to its users' needs. And as the connected home develops, new research issues and opportunities will be highlighted, allowing Philips to develop intuitive and natural ways of using identification based solutions to integrate ambient intelligence and connectivity into all our living environments.

Creating the PHENOM solution has helped Philips to gauge the current capabilities of connected home solutions and is guiding developments in how people will interact with technology in the future. Philips Research's facilities are providing an ideal environment in which to test new RFID solutions, and with the recent launch of Philips' NFC (Near Field Communications), the possibilities for wireless connectivity in the home are simply tremendous.

(Quotation from http://www.semiconductors.philips.com/markets/identification/articles/success/s61/)

Publications:

Teixeira, D., Ferreira, M. & Verhaegh, V. (2003). An Integrated Framework for Supporting Photo Viewing Activities in Home Environments. Paper presented at the European Symposium on Ambient Intelligence, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. [abstract|paper]

Related sites: An overview of the PHENOM project