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Information Management Systems

Research Group

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Members
Maristella Agosti
 Michela Bacchin
 Franco Crivellari
 Giorgio Di Nunzio
 Graziano Deambrosis
Nicola Ferro Massimo Melucci Nicola Orio
 Luca Pretto
Research Scope
The Information Management Systems (IMS) Research Group is one of the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padova. The group activities are concerned with the design, modelling and implementation of advanced information retrieval and digital libraries systems. Digital Libraries (DL) are new infrastructures and environments that make available organised collections of digital information. The research on DL addresses principles, methods, systems, and tools to build and make available effective DL to end users. What makes DL different from the Web is the rigorous and sophisticated organisation of heterogeneous multimedia data, and the distributed, fast and easy access to those data. Information Retrieval (IR) is the science that addresses the efficient and effective gathering, indexing, organization and retrieval from billion document collection of all and only the multi-media data that are relevant to millions users' information needs. Though IR has been being addressed since Fifties, new research efforts, technology and theoretical results have been produced since the advent of Web search engines and agents.
Events
Dialogues 2004 SPIRE 2004 SEBD 2004 Special Issue on Web IR Intl EU NoE DELOS Workshop on DL Architecture Giornata di studio sull'IR
Research Topics
Automatic text categorization.
Many times we tried to classify our books, papers, CDs, accordingly to our personal category system, and we systematically realize how difficult this task is. Let us figure what happes if we tried to classify millions of Web pages, growing at hundred thousand items per day. This is the task of ATC.
more...		 Automatic link generation, analysis and mining. How many times do you need to tranform a set of documents into a Web hypertext, add semantic content Web links, provide effective retrieval, grasp knowledge from the topology of the graph induced by a set of Web sites
more...		 Music information retrieval.It would be very nice to hum or play a refrain of your favorite music, e.g. Jazz or Baroque, and get access to the full audio object or to the complete notated score of the relevant documents. The challenge is then to retrieve the music documents that are relevant to a generic music query, including those not matching a pattern, written by a unknown authors or being untitled.
more...		 Digital Document Annotation.
Interaction with Digital Library (DL) content can be enhanced by the use of digital annotations. Annotating DL documents is a means to support cognitive functions like remembering, thinking or clarifying, thus enhancing the user\222s experience of studying and retrieving content. Moreover, shared annotations support discussion and cooperative work among DL users. With annotations, users can interpret documents, and annotations also support the effective use of a digital library by helping the user approaching a document through interpretations. Thus, the use of annotations in a DL environment seems very promising, in that it should bring DL users' knowledge together, build community and create new knowledge.
Multilingual information retrieval.Did you never wonder if there are papers written in Italian, retrieval.Did you never wonder if there are papers written in Italian, Russian, Japanese and being relevant to your query being written in English? To access ``foreign'' documents, we need multilingual systems, but the development of language based tools is an expensive human labour. And, what if we performed that labour in a fully automatic way?
more...		 Information Retrieval in Context. It is assumed that contextual data can be used effectively to constrain retrieval of information thereby reducing the complexity of the retrieval process. The challenge is to understand, modeling and capture context. At IMS, context modeling and discovery is addressed by using mathematical yet computational notions.
 Peer-to-Peer Information Retrieval. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks provide access to collections of data
which can be both structured and unstructured. In the latter case, if
an IR service is available in a P2P network, a user can search for
relevant documents stored in peers connected to his own computer,
mobile phone or PDA. A weighing model is studied and proposed to reduce network exploration and maximize retrieval performance.
 Stemming. Several times the user employs word variants being different from the ones in the documents, by thus missing relevant information. Multilingual stemmer production requires usually multiple knowledge about the languages. A model for automatic, rapid and effective stemmer generation is proposed.
Current Projects and Feasibility Studies
Enhanced Content Delivery.(National Research Council and Ministry of University, Research Delivery.(National Research Council and Ministry of University, Research and Education -- 2002-2004) The group participates to the Action 1 of the ECD project, which will focus on developing tools and technologies for delivering enhanced contents to final users. This entails identifying relevant material from various sources, transforming it, adding to it metadata and other useful distinguishing information, organizing it and delivering the most relevant material to interested users in a timely fashion.
more...		 Digital Museums.The group is involved in a feasibility study for the development of an on-line access to Italian University Museums, that is to museums that are hosted by the Italian universities. The primary goal of this study is to propose an unified approach for the indexing of and the accessing to the description and the digital version of pieces held by museums. It has to be considered that University Museums may have remarkably different collections, for instance hand-drawings of plants, scientific intrumentation, or archeological foundings.
more...		 Cross-Language Evaluation Forum. (University of Padova -- 2003) Under the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) umbrella, the group carries on multilingual information retrieval evaluation within a common infrastructure for the testing, tuning and evaluation of information retrieval systems operating on European languages in both monolingual and cross-language contexts.
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DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries. The Department of Information Engineering, through the IMS group, is a member of DELOS, which is the European Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries funded by the EU's Sixth Framework Programme. The DELOS network conducts a joint program of activities aimed at integrating and coordinating the ongoing research activities of the major European teams working in DL-related areas with the goal of developing the next generation DL technologies.
more...		 Centre of Excellence.(Ministry of University, Research and Education, and University of Padova -- 2001-2003) At the University of Padua is based the Centre of Excellence on Science and Applications of Advanced Computational Paradigms. The research group cooperates for aspects related to data storage architecture and object database management systems for application in high energy physics.
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