10473585
Metadata design for Chinese medicine digital library using XML
The development of Chinese medicine has been growing rapidly and is beginning to draw significant attention globally. In Hong Kong in particular, the government has targeted Chinese medicine as one of its major future developments. A system for registering Chinese medical practitioners is being set up and a Chinese medicine port for medical manufacturing and research is being investigated. Although it has drawn significant attention, information about Chinese medicine is not yet widely available on the Internet, and searching for such information is extremely difficult. In this paper, we present an XML metadata design for Chinese medicine. The system encompasses a register server, information servers, a search engine and client programs that have been developed to browse and search the XML documents that are available in distributed Chinese medicine digital libraries.
818365
Effects of luminance quantization error on color image processing
A common approach to color image processing is to apply monochrome techniques to the quantized intensity component. However, the quantization error in the intermediate intensity image propagates to the final processed image. This can lead to significant distortion, depending on the input RGB values and on the particular image processing function being applied. A theoretical analysis of the worst-case quantization error is presented. Experimental results with histogram equalization demonstrate how the histogram resolution affects the performance.
46320705
Intelligent Internet searching engine based on hybrid simulated annealing
The World Wide Web (WWW) based Internet services have become a major channel for information delivery. For the same reason, information overload also has become a serious problem to the users of such services. It has been estimated that the amount of information stored on the Internet doubled every 18 months. The speed of increase of home pages can be even faster, some people estimated that it doubled every six months. Therefore, a scalable approach to support Internet searching is critical to the success of Internet services and other current or future National Information Infrastructure (NII) applications. We discuss using a modified version of simulated annealing algorithm to develop an intelligent personal spider (agent), which is based on automatic textual analysis of the Internet documents and hybrid simulated annealing.
8917879
Performance-Based Content Retrieval for Learning Object Repositories on Grid Environments
The sharable content object reference model (SCORM) has become a popular standard for sharing and reusing teaching materials in the field of e-learning. However, efficient retrieval of SCORM-compliant learning objects stored on grid environments is a challenging problem. In this paper, a performance-based approach is proposed to retrieve teaching materials in grid environments. The proposed architecture uses the real-time information gathered by a resource-monitoring tool to estimate the dynamically changing performance of each node, for CPU loading and network bandwidth. In addition, a grid testbed is built to implement the model. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can choose the most appropriate site to reduce the retrieval time
15657957
Automatic Summarization of Chinese and English
As a result of the rapid growth in Internet access, significantly more information has become available online in real time. However, there is not sufficient time for users to read large volumes of information and make decisions accordingly. The problem of information-overloading can be resolved through the application of automatic summarization. Many summarization systems for documents in different languages have been implemented. However, the performance of summarization system on documents in different languages has not yet been investigated. In this paper, we compare the result of fractal summarization technique on parallel documents in Chinese and English. The grammatical and lexical differences between Chinese and English have significant effect on the summarization processes. Their impact on the performances of the summarization for the Chinese and English parallel documents is compared.
16166999
Automatic Construction of Cross-Lingual Networks of Concepts from the Hong Kong SAR Police Department
The tragic event of September 11 has prompted the rapid growth of attention of national security and criminal analysis. In the national security world, very large volumes of data and information are generated and gathered. Much of this data and information written in different languages and stored in different locations may be seemingly unconnected. Therefore, cross-lingual semantic interoperability is a major challenge to generate an overview of this disparate data and information so that it can be analysed, searched. The traditional information retrieval (IR) approaches normally require a document to share some keywords with the query. In reality, the users may use some keywords that are different from what used in the documents. There are then two different term spaces, one for the users, and another for the documents. The problem can be viewed as the creation of a thesaurus. The creation of such relationships would allow the system to match queries with relevant documents, even though they contain different terms. Apart from this, terrorists and criminals may communicate through letters, e-mails and faxes in languages other than English. The translation ambiguity significantly exacerbates the retrieval problem. To facilitate cross-lingual information retrieval, a corpusbased approach uses the term co-occurrence statistics in parallel or comparable corpora to construct a statistical translation model to cross the language boundary. However, collecting parallel corpora between European language and Oriental language is not an easy task due to the unique linguistics and grammar structures of oriental languages. In this paper, the text-based approach to align English/Chinese Hong Kong Police press release documents from the Web is first presented. This article then reports an algorithmic approach to generate a robust knowledge base based on statistical correlation analysis of the semantics (knowledge) embedded in the bilingual press release corpus. The research output consisted of a thesaurus-like, semantic network knowledge base, which can aid in semantics-based cross-lingual information management and retrieval.
14016299
Building Parallel Corpora by Automatic Title Alignment
Cross-lingual semantic interoperability has drawn significant research attention recently, as the number of digital libraries in non-English languages has grown exponentially. Cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) across different European languages, such as English, Spanish and French, has been widely explored, but CLIR across European and Oriental languages is still at the initial stages. To cross the language boundary, a corpus-based approach shows promise of overcoming the limitations of knowledge-based and controlled vocabulary approaches. However, collecting parallel corpora between European and Oriental languages is not an easy task. Length-based and text-based approaches are two major approaches to align parallel documents. In this paper, we investigate several techniques using these approaches, and compare their performance in aligning English and Chinese titles of parallel documents available on the Web.
33160619
Characterization Of Electroosmotic Flow In Microchannels
This paper presents experimental and theoretical studies of the electroosmotic flow in microchannels. The current monitoring method is used to determine the average flow velocity and the ζ potential by measuring the current-time relationship during electrolyte displacement process. A rigorous mathematical model is developed to describe the electrokinetic transport phenomena in such displacement process. Experiments were carried out for the NaCl electrolyte to evaluate the electroosmotic velocity and the ζ potential under various experimental conditions. The theoretical predictions for the current-time relationship are compared with measured results.