Project Suggestion: Physics Digital Library and OAI

• Number of people: 2-3
• Goal: To develop an ontology and initial support for physics departments
• Contact information: Professor Royce Zia (Physics, Virginia Tech, rkpzia@vt.edu), Professor Eberhard Hilf (Physics, University of Oldenburg, Germany, hilf@egoiste.physik.uni-oldenburg.de) and his staff, Marcos Andre Goncalves (mgoncalv@vt.edu), and the instructor
• Required background: interest in physics and familiarity with library, digital library and/or information retrieval system operation
• Description: NSF will fund 2 students for 3 years starting May 2001 on a project to apply ideas related to the Open Archives Initiative to two application domains, in US and Germany. One is to help make available information of interest to physics departments. As background see useful services. The work involves developing an ontology or characterization of the relevant information and to map how that is represented around the world so that open archives can be developed, harvested, and support highly effective information access.

  This effort aims to get that project started. It will include analysis, design, and prototyping. Some various publications and in particular the references following:

  1. Thomas Severiens, Michael Hohlfeld, Kerstin Zimmermann, Eberhard R. Hilf, "PhysDoc - A Distributed Network of Physics Institutions Documents: Collecting, Indexing, and Searching High Quality Documents by using Harvest", D-Lib Magazine, December 2000, Volume 6 Number 12, http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december00/severiens/12severiens.html
  2. E. R. Hilf, "Integration of Research Institutes into the Future World-Wide Network of Scientific Information," presented at International Workshop of Max Planck Gesellschaft MPG: The Transformation of Science, Elmau, Bavaria, Germany, 1999. http://www.physik.uni-oldenburg.de/~hilf/vortraege/Elmau/MPG-vortrag-full.html .
  3. T. Severiens, "The EuroPhysNet-Project," presented at Proceedings of the International Workshop of the AK-MetaDaten on "MetaData: Qualifying WebObjects", 1997. http://www.mathematik.uni-osnabrueck.de/projects/workshop97/papers/severien5.1.98.html