Taiwan Abstracts

ChinaGIS

The project ChinaGIS implements a prototype web-interface of a user-friendly Geo-Information-System. Its objectives are the intuitive handling, analysis and visualization of historical data with spatially related content. The system enables the user to publish its data in interactive maps. While the first prototype still relies on the GoogleMapsAPI as map renderer, the next version will implement a full open-source solution for rendering maps as well and thereby will become independent on future marketing decisions of Google. While the prototype provides access to the system only by a single browser-based frontend, the next version will furthermore implement a RESTful API. This API will allow the user to design its own user interface as a website, an applet or an application. Thereby it will be easily to integrate within the Scholarly Workbench Project of the Max-Planck-Society. Besides data supplied by the user and data already stored in the systems database, the system will also access various alternative geo-data-sources as well as context relevant data sources like digital libraries. The user will then be able to create links from an interactive map into a digital text document, but also find and locate place names within digitized texts. We will present the workflow to produce an interactive map from a digitized version of the "Tien-Kung Kai-Wu" by Song Yingxing with an overlay of Song's journeys in China.

Scholarly Desktop

The Scholarly Desktop Project at the MPIWG is part of the Scholarly Workbench Project of the Max Planck Digital Library of the Max Planck Society. It aims to provide tools for researchers

• to publish sources electrionically
• to annotate these sources
• to link these sources
• to combine secondary sources with primary sources.

Simple workflows support scholarly work with sources, in particular adding sources which can be done from the desktop of the scholar. The architecture follows a modular concept, at the level of the desktop as well as on the level of the repository and external services. In this context, Modularity means that all components of a work flow can be exchanged and combined using open standards. Where ever possible already existing standards will be used, RDF, RSS, OWL,XMPP,JSON... . The guiding line is the concept of pipes as used in yahoo or deri pipes. On the desktop itself drag and drop technologies will be used. The presentation will focus on the already existing elements of the project and technologies prototypically implemented in the ECHO project at the MPIWG. In particular, we will show how to work with digitial images online, how to present XML transcription of documents, combined with linguistic tools, and how these features lead to new forms of presentation in the web.