Search

Among the wide range of digital libraries, an interesting, yet quite neglected, subclass is constituted by those exclusively dealing with newspaper clippings. Compared with book–oriented digital libraries, clipping libraries are more difficult to seize, since they are wide and unstructured, and the subjects and content of a clipping are completely heterogeneous. LAURIN is an EU–funded project involving seventeen participants from several countries, including two software companies and a large group of libraries, whose main purpose is to set up a network of digitalized newspaper clipping archives that can be easily accessed through the Internet, for searching and retrieving clippings. The project also provides the libraries with models and methodologies to be used for scanning, digitalizing, storing, indexing, and making accessible newspaper clippings. This paper concentrates on the main architectural features of the LAURIN distributed system, exposing the peculiarities deriving from the diverse users and tasks it supports.

The ESPRIT Project DWQ (Foundations of Data Warehouse Quality) aimed at improving the quality of DW design and operation through systematic enrichment of the semantic foundations of data warehousing. Logic-based knowledge representation and reasoning techniques were developed to control accuracy, consistency, and completeness via advanced conceptual modeling techniques for source integration, data reconciliation, and multi-dimensional aggregation. This is complemented by quantitative optimization techniques for view materialization, optimizing timeliness and responsiveness without losing the semantic advantages from the conceptual approach. At the operational level, query rewriting and materialization refreshment algorithms exploit the knowledge developed at design time. The demonstration shows the interplay of these tools under a shared metadata repository, based on an example extracted from an application at Telecom Italia.