Significant Projects
We have developed the third generation of our Events on Line technology, called Testimony Software. Testimony Software now has its own browser and an integrated authoring toolkit enabling you to concentrate on the content of your product and leave the programming to us. Testimony Software has already been applied in products for the Sydney Jewish Museum, the National Parks & Wildlife Service of NSW at their Laperouse Museum and the National Library of Australia for their oral history collection. Testimony Software is available from our sister company, attendonline pty ltd. [Go to attendonline web site] [ Go to Testimony Software page]
We have worked with DUAP on a number of projects involving planning information systems and digital planning environments. We developed three concept demonstrators towards realising a digital planning instrument, a digital environment wherein each parcel of land 'knows' the planning regulations associated with it and where planners, developers and owners can ask questions about what is allowable. We also assisted in the implementation of an industrial lands database wherein developers can determine suitable parcels of industrial land based on the parcel's attributes and their specific requirements. This system was funded under the connect.NSW initiative of the NSW government.
The ABC commissioned us to write a document for them exploring the opportunities available to a broadcaster in the converged Internet, broadcasting and multimedia environment. The document described the existing technologies, emerging technologies and ended with a SWOT analysis of the ABC in this emerging environment. This document was developed in concert with, but separate from, the re-evaluation of the ABC by its, then, new Managing Director, Jonathon Shiers.
This project commenced whilst Dr. Jansen was a Principal Research Scientist at CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences. This project, a collaboration with the Australia Council, established two artist in residencies within the Information Technology industry, one at CSIRO and the other at Firmware Design, although the latter was later withdrawn for commercial reasons. Each residency was providing selected artists with a twelve month placement with the chosen organisation to assist that organisation in the uptake of arts know-how and skills for the benefit of that organisation, providing the artist with access to the technology that organisation could provide for the development of the artist's skills and know how, and providing the artist with a stipend of $35,000 per year funded by the organisation. The aim of the residency program was to build two-way bridges between the arts and IT sectors to facilitate the uptake of relevant skills and know by both sides. The project resulted in an artist being placed with CSIRO for 1997/8. CSIRO has continued with the program, expanding it to any Division in the organisation.
Affinities is an exchange exhibition involving eleven artists, six from Korea and five from Australia. The exhibition toured NSW, August 1997 to February 1998, and was exhibited in Seoul, Korea in April 1998. The exhibition was sponsored by Ansett Australia, Asialink, The University of Sydney Union, Australia Korea Foundation, Tin Sheds Gallery, Walker Hill Art Centre and Turtle Lane Studios. The exhibition was organised and co-curated by Yvonne Boag (Turtle Lane Studios) and Therese Kenyon (Tin Sheds Gallery).
The English Aboriginal Dictionary project has created a multimedia dictionary for translating between English and two Aboriginal languages, Kuuku Ya'u and Umpila. These languages are spoken by the Lockhart River Community, north of Cairns on Cape York. The dictionary enables a user to find a specific term either starting from English, Kuuku Ya'u or Umpila or to browse a hierarchy of images. Once at the specified term, the user can hear the term spoken in English, Kuuku Ya'u or Umpila and hear the term in a sentence, used in context, again in any of the three languages.
This project developed an architecture for publishing an event using the World Wide Web. The architecture enables the recording of the richness of the event by using the various types of information available to an attendee. The digital event can be value added through the addition of extra material and facilities, for example, chat rooms, background material, etc. From a attendee's perspective, the electronic event can be manipulated using state-of-the-art identification and retrieval techniques as well as supporting multiple channels of information exchange.
Todate, we have used the Events On Line technology on behalf of:
the Australian Vice Chancellors' Committee to develop an electronic proceedings of a one-day workshop;
Australian artist Yvonne Boag, to develop an introduction to some of her recent work;
the Federal Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA), formerly the Department of Communications and the Arts (DOCA), to develop a CD ROM related to intellectual property issues with regard to electronic arts; and
the organising committee of the Information Online & On Disc'99 conference to develop an electronic proceedings of a session titled Digital Libraries Forum. A review of this development wasa recently published in Incite, an electronic magazine distributed by ALIA. [Read a review]
An Events On Line site has been established with access to our on-line demonstrations - you can see:
- an electronic proceedings of the Symposium on Australian Electronic Publishing, a one day symposium held in May 1996 and developed for the Australian Vice Chancellors' Committee Electronic Publishing Working Group;
- an art exhibition of the work of Yvonne Boag; and
- a tourism application 'Postcards from the Web'.
Before you run any demonstrations, however, you should check out the settings on your browser by visiting our settings page.
To read about the Electronic Proceedings project where we created the Events On Line technology, follow this link to our paper presented at the Electronic Publishing Conference, EP'98, in Budapest, 1998 [Go to EP'98 Paper] or read an overview of the system as a PDF file [Read Overview]
Context represents Dr. Jansen's research interest over the past few years. This project explores the nature and use of context in advanced information systems. Dr. Jansen was instrumental in applying for, and organising, the IJCAI'93 Workshop 'Using Knowledge in its Context'.
Dr. Jansen, as a member of the Preservation and Access to Australian Information working party (PADI) was involved in the establishment of policies for the long-term preservation of digital objects and their successful access over time. The working party involved collaborators from the major collection agencies in Australia, including the National Library of Australia, the National Film and Sound Archive and the Australian Archives. The working party developing a web site as a major source for advice on electronic object preservation and access. Dr. Jansen led the technical subgroup and providing design consulting for the Working Party's web site (http://www.nla.gov.au/padi/).
TLSReferences is a bibliographic system that Dr. Jansen has been developing to manage the myriad of references to information objects collected as part of work. It was developed to manage a four drawer filing cabinet as well as computer filestore and now also manages Web pages. Each information object is recorded with descriptive details, including its title, authors, publication details, keywords, abstract and assertions. Assertions are the name given to those interesting snippets discovered in someone else's paper, ie. a phrase or piece of text usually used to retrieve it at a later date. TLSreferecnes is available for purchase. Please contact Bob. [Contact Bob]
IntelliText is a computer program emulating an electronic `book' but focussing on the reading and annotation of a book instead of the authoring of its content. Analogous to a real book, an IntelliText book is a single-user book, not a multi-user reading tool.
The electronic version of a corpus will value-add the more traditional paper-based version by:-
* enabling a reader to annotate the corpus electronically,
* enabling a reader to electronically correlate a corpus with other documents in their possession,
* supporting free-text retrieval capabilities thus enabling the reader to open the corpus anywhere based on simple search criteria,
* showing the reader pathways deemed interesting or relevant to particular themes as defined by one of the authors of the electronic version based on their own and/or other experts' viewpoints,
* enabling the reader to create their own pathways through the corpus thus identifying themes relevant to them,
* enabling the reader to subsequently retrieve a pathway and `re-play' it,
* enabling a reader to graphically depict and annotate relationships between objects comprising the corpus,
* enabling the reader to store and subsequently visualise different viewpoints of the corpus, viewpoints that may correlate to other experts' opinions as to themes, areas of importance, etc.
This project grew out of Dr. Jansen's previous research into explanation systems for Knowledge-based Systems. Dr. Jansen managed the IntelliText project as well as being co-designer.
An implementation of IntelliText to the archive of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. A collaboration between CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences (formerly the Division of Information Technology) and the CNRS Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes, France. Dr. Jansen was designer and implementor of this half-person-year project.
The Electronic Publishing Innovations Centre (EPICentre), a joint initiative between the CSIRO Division of Information Technology, CSIRO Publishing, Monash University, and RMIT, explored 12 aspects of electronic publishing in the context of developing electronic version of the Australian Journal of Chemistry (AJC) and the further development of the electronic journal Psyche. These aspects covered: data structure and architecture (representation); eading process; retrieval of information and printing of retrieved items; the distribution alternatives; the editing process; the reviewing process; refereed communications; impact on the writing of (original) scholarly publications; user acceptance and behaviour with scientific multimedia; cost of usage; revenue and economic viability; and copyright issues.
Dr. Jansen's was the project manager of this project as well evaluating high level mark up languages or document-type descriptions (DTD's) for both journals and produce prototypes. He implemented examples of the articles using Adobe Acrobat PDF (Portable Document Format), SGML and HTML. The project results and outcomes can be explored at http://www.informit.com.au/epicentre.
Design to Print was a project involving CSIRO DIT, the Printing Industries Association of Australia, the Graphic Arts Services Association of Australia, NSW TAFE, the NSW Government Printer and the National Printing Industry Training Council. The project explored the influence that electronic publishing is having on the printing industry.
Design to Print has been produced as an initial attempt to address the obstacles to efficiency in the Australian printing industry. The document does not address all the aspects of electronic publishing, but it provides the motivation, basis and focus for the creation and communication of additional information to assist those who prepare and manipulate documents electronically.
Design to Print was developed with three objectives,
1) to provide a basis from which a dictionary of electronic publishing terminology may be further developed;
2) to provide users with directions and industry-acceptable procedures for the creation of electronic documents, and
3) to provide an accurate and simple method for estimating the costs involved in production.
An electronic version of this document can be viewed at the Printing Industries Assciociation of Australia web site, Printnet