Superimposed Information

[Gerry Mckiernan]

                           _Superimposed Information_

   In response to my recent posting on Reader-Designated  HyperLinking
In/Between/Among E-Journals 

  [ http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Web4Lib/archive/0102/0193.html ]

   I received the response below from Lois Delcambre, Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, at the Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology. [Re-posted with permission of Lois Delcambre]

   She and her colleagues are involved in very fascinating work that I believe
could provide significant enhancements in using electronic journals.

    Regards,

/Gerry McKiernan
Superimposed Librarian
Iowa State University
Ames IA 50011

gerrymck at iastate.edu 

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Dave Maier and Lois Delcambre are developing a research program into what we called superimposed information.  Superimposed information is supplemental information, conceptually and perhaps physically distinct from the base information.  Superimposed information may contain new information and it may contain what we call "marks" to selected information elements in the base layer.  The superimposed information might be structured according to some model...such as XML or RDF or Topic Maps, etc.  The superimposed information can thus highlight, annotate, interconnect, organize, elaborate selected information elements in the underlying or what we call base information sources. Superimposed information  allows you to connect two information elements, as you
describe in your e-mail.

We are interested in defining an architecture for building superimposed
applications - where we look for opportunities to build generic technology.  Our work is proceeding in the context of two projects:

"Tracking footprints through a medical information space" 
[ www.cse.ogi.edu/footprints  ]
and

"Harvesting informatoin to sustain our forests" 
[ www.cse.ogi.edu/forest  ]

You might be interested in the papers available for the first website on what we call "bundles" - a mechanims to mark information selections from various sources and group them together in a named bundle.  We have two papers - one about "bundles in the wild" describing observational work and one called "bundles in captivity" describing our research.