UC Berkeley's NSF/ARPA/NASA digital libraries project

Abstract

The UC Berkeley Electronic Environmental Library Project is a multi-disciplinary project funded under the NSF/NASA/ARPA Digital Libraries Initiative. The goal is to develop a massive, distributed, electronic, work-centered library of environmental information containing text, images, maps, sound, full-motion videos, numeric datasets, and hypertextual multimedia composite documents to support actual environmental planning decisions.By work-centered, we mean a digital library designed to support the work of the users, in this case, environmental planning. The users are from diverse organizations, 'united by their goal of environmental planning. This project is unusual among digital library research projects in this focus on information in support of public policymaking. The potential users and uses of the system are extremely varied and the applications are complex and of substantial practical significance.Our primary goals are to provide a coherent, content-based view of a diverse distributed collection which will scale to very large collections and large numbers of clients and servers, and to improve data acquisition technology. The project is addressing these problems by research focusing on:• New paradigms of user-system interaction;• Fully automated indexing and intelligent retrieval;• Data base technology to support electronic library applications;• A more effect protocol for client/server information retrieval;• Resources discovery and distributed search algorithms;• A communications-theoretic approach to document analysis;• Compression and communication for remote browsing;• New methods of user needs assessment and evaluation.The testbed consists of the diverse information types and media that are used in environmental planning. The data range from unprocessed sensor data through many levels of analysis and synthesis to policy recommendations and decision. The media include text, images, maps, and geo-referenced datasets, in paper and electronic forms. The initial focus has been water planning for the San Francisco Bay Delta; currently we are broadening our scope to other geographical areas. The target users are the participants in environmental planning employees of state agencies, but also people in local and federal agencies, environmental and industry groups, and the public.