Tiziana Catarci

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Sapienza University of Rome

In this paper, we introduce a methodology to be employed for collaborative projects. This methodology, called HORIZON, has been successfully employed in the past for FP6 and FP7 EU projects, but we strongly believe it can be fruitfully employed for H2020 projects as well, guaranteeing quality requirements to be met.

The Sapienza Digital Library (SDL) was released in December 2013 as result of a research project undertaken by Sapienza University of Rome and the Cineca consortium, since 2011. The digital library has been collecting materials coming from different kind of organizations including departments, libraries, and archives, belonging or donated to Sapien...

This contribution is the preface of the volume of post-proceedings of the 10th Italian Research Conference on Digital Libraries, IRCDL 2014. The volume contains the reports on the invited presentations and the accepted papers. The accepted papers were initially reviewed for presentation at the conference, and after the presentation the papers were...

Usability and accessibility issues are common causes why software fails to meet user requirements. However, requirements engineers still focus on functional requirements and might ignore to also elicit system usability and accessibility requirements. This is a high risk which can lead to project and software failure. Improving the usability and acc...

Artful processes are informal processes typically carried out by those people whose work is mental rather than physical (managers, professors, researchers, engineers, etc.), the so called “knowledge workers”. mailofmine is a tool, the aim of which is to automatically build, on top of a collection of e-mail messages, a set of workflow models that re...

This chapter focuses on the visualization of multi-domain search results. We start by positioning the problem in the recent line of evolution of search engine interfaces, which more and more are capable of mining semantic concepts and associations from text data and presenting them in sophisticated ways that depend on the type of the extracted data...

This article reports a unified methodology developed to evaluate the accessibility and usability of mobile computing applications, which is intended to guarantee universal access as far as possible. As a basis for the methodology, this paper presents an analysis of the accessibility guidelines, conducted to take into account the specificity of mobi...

Heuristic evaluation has proven popular for desktop and web interfaces, both in practical design and as a research topic. Compared to full user studies, heuristic evaluation can be highly cost-effective, allowing a large proportion of usability flaws to be detected ahead of full development with limited resource investment. Mobile computing shares...

Organizations and enterprises have developed complex data and information exchange systems that are now vital for their daily operations. Currently available systems, however, face a major challenge. On todays global information infrastructure, data semantics is more and more context- and time-dependent, and cannot be fixed once and for all at desi...

It cannot be overstated that the knowledge discovery process still presents formidable challenges. One of the main issues in knowledge discovery is the need for an overall framework that can support the entire discovery process. It is worth noting the role and place of visualization in such a framework. Visualization enables or triggers the user to...

There exist various guidelines for facilitating the design, preparation, and deployment of accessible eLearning applications and contents. However, such guidelines prevalently address accessibility in a rather technical sense, without giving sufficient consideration to the cognitive aspects and issues related to the use of eLearning materials by le...

Probably the most difficult task of producing a map is that of placing the text for the point, line and area features that one expects to see depicted on a geographic map. This paper describes the problem, its subtleties, and challenges, and outlines ...

There is a consensus on the significance and high contribution of user involvement in the process of user interfaces development. However, there is no standard way to implement user involvement in software development processes. Dealing with speech-based interfaces that involve vocal interaction of speaking and hearing, the need of user involvement...

Catalogue browsing is a well known activity in the library world. We are all familiar with the box of cards that is used by the librarian who browsed it over in order to find the card for the book we were searching for. The Catalogue Browsing Access Paradigm (CBAP) that is suggested in this report 1 aims at providing the users with the same feeling...

Most of the existing efforts for supporting the design, preparation, and deployment of accessible e-learning applications propose guidelines that primarily address technical accessibility issues. Little, if any, consideration is given to the real actors involved in the learning experience, such as didactical experts and disabled learners. Moreover,...

We introduce a novel view on how to deal with the problems of semantic interoperability in distributed systems. This view is based on the concept of emergent semantics, which sees both the representation of semantics and the discovery of the proper interpretation of symbols as the result of a self-organizing process performed by distributed agents...

This article discusses an innovative system for traffic management that is presently under installation in the city of Valencia. Key features of the system are to exploit open source software components and use MPEG-4 video streaming over an Internet protocol. The video streaming management is particularly sophisticated, resulting in a flexible, ef...

Of late there has been a growing interest and effort toward meeting the requirements of persons with special needs. However, most of the accessibility standards and guidelines that have been proposed have been developed by adopting a domain independent and often 'technical' perspective. Such proposals are therefore often not sufficient to achieve a...

In this article, the authors offer their perspective about online learning. In general, we know that online learning develops through interaction and that it's a collaborative process where students actively engage in writing and reading messages among themselves and with the instructor. However, it's also well known that in any online community, n...

Although expert-based evaluation techniques such as heuristic evaluation and cognitive walkthrough are often inexpensive and quick to apply, they have not proved to be effective in capturing contextual factors that arise in real-world settings. It is no trivial issue to understand how such evaluation techniques could be modified or differently appl...

This paper presents the rationale and design process of an authoring interface that enables didactic experts to create or modify eLearning content to make it accessible by learners with special needs. The tool has been designed according to a methodological framework and a set of guidelines for eLearning accessibility previously developed by our gr...

This paper explores an original approach to overcome current issues in the use of mobile devices, such as limited screen space and interaction modalities, based on exploiting interface adaptation and adaptive techniques. Specifically, the paper describes the application of this approach to a web searching prototype, which collects usage data to mod...

In an age characterized by tremendous technological break- throughs, the world is witnessing overwhelming quantities and types of information. Digital Libraries (DLs) are a result of these breakthroughs, but they have not been spared by the challenges resulting from them. While DLs stakeholders are still struggling to come to terms with the massive...

Different organizations adopt accessibility for various and diverse reasons. Interesting and inspiring as such reasons may be, it is important to ensure that the motivation for supporting accessibility is that it is the right thing to do, i.e. a commitment to the provision of equal opportunities for accessing resources for people with special needs...

Developing the semantic web is a key research challenge. The conference on Ontologies, DataBases, and Applications of Semantics for Large Scale Information Systems (ODBASE’04) provides a forum on ontologies and data semantics that is inclusive of the many computing disciplines involved in such a challenge, such as ontology management, information m...

Most of the existing efforts for supporting the preparation and delivery of accessible e-learning materials propose guidelines that prevalently ad-dress technical accessibility issues. However, little or no consideration is given to the didactical creators in the learning material preparation. The existing guidelines also usually provide generic in...

With new standards like RDF or OWL paving the way for the much anticipated Semantic Web, a new breed of very large scale semantic systems is about to appear. Traditional semantic reconciliation techniques, dependent upon shared vocabularies or global ontologies, cannot be used in such open and dynamic environments. Instead, new heuristics based on...

There exist various efforts for supporting the preparation and delivery of accessible Web-based learning content (e.g., [3], [1], etc). Most of the efforts for supporting the preparation and deployment of accessible Web-based learning material propose guidelines that prevalently address technical accessibility issues. However, little or no consider...

Information and communication infrastructures underwent a rapid and extreme decentralization process over the past decade: From a world of statically and partially connected central servers rose an intricate web of millions of information sources loosely connecting one to another. Today, we expect to witness the extension of this revolution with th...

That the already vast and ever-increasing amounts of data still do present formidable challenges to effective and efficient acquisition of knowledge is by no means an exaggeration. The knowledge discovery process entails more than just the application of data mining strategies. There are many other aspects including, but not limited to: planning, d...

In this paper we describe the principles of the design and development of an intelligent query in- terface, done in the context of the SEWASIE (SEman- tic Webs and AgentS in Integrated Economies) Euro- pean IST project. The SEWASIE project aims at en- abling a uniform access to heterogeneous data sources through an integrated ontology. The query in...

Managing the quality of exchanged data is a relevant problem in any cooperative information system. If the quality of exchanged data is not known, the cooperation itself is negatively affected; indeed, an organization can prefer not requiring data at all, rather than receiving bad quality data. Therefore, there is the need of providing mechanisms t...

Current approaches to the development of cooperative informationsrmati arebas7 onsh710)1 to be o#ered by cooperating organizations and on the opportunity of building coordinators and brokers on top of sh h s79((jhq The quality of data exchanged and provided by di#erents7X)P(h hampers ss h approaches as data of low quality can snh0j all over the coo...

In cooperative information systems, the quality of data ex-changed and provided by different data sources is extremely important. A lack of attention to data quality can imply data of low quality to spread all over the cooperative system. At the same time, improvement can be based on comparing data, correcting them and disseminating high quality da...

Phone & Fax +39 06 49918331 It is well known that visualisation techniques are suitable for an effective exploration of large data sets. However, not much research has been carried out on applying visualisation techniques in the analysis of medical data apart from image data. Medical information systems collect a vast amount of monitored clinical d...

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...

Massimo Mecella 1, Monica Scannapieco 1'2, Antonino Virgillito 1, Roberto Baldoni I , Tiziana Catarci 1, and Carlo Batini 3 i Universirk di Roma "La Sapienza" Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica {mecella, monscan, virgi, baldoni, catarci}dis. uniromal. it 2 Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche Istituto di Analisi dei Sistemi ed Informatica (IA...

There is a need for an overall framework that can support the entire knowledge discovery process. Of special interest, is the role of visualization in such a framework. This paper focuses on the exploitation of various visual strategies with a view to discovering knowledge through metarules and association rules.

DMengine architecture 6 ## ###### ######### #Tiziana Catarci, Stephen Kimani, Giuseppe Santucci# # 5 Proposed Interface 9 6 Usability 25 7 Future Work 26 ### ###### ##########Paolo Ciaccia, Giovambattista Ianni, Stefano Lodi, Luigi Palopoli, Marco Patella, Claudio Sartori# ## 8 Metarules interchange format 27 9 Clustering 32 10 Approximate Similari...

In this report we review and compare data mining methods and algorithms. After a short introduction on the general concepts of data mining we focus on four speci c topics, metaquerying, data clustering, similarity queries and visualization, and go deeper, analyzing the various approaches and proposals known in the literature and, where applicable,...

In this report we review and compare data mining methods and algorithms. After a short introduction on the general concepts of data mining we focus on four speci c topics, metaquerying, data clustering, similarity queries and visualization, and go deeper, analyzing the various approaches and proposals known in the literature and, where applicable,...

It is often too expensive to compute and materialize a complete high-dimensional data cube. Computing an iceberg cube, which contains only aggregates above certain thresholds, is an effective way to derive nontrivial multi-dimensional aggregations for ...

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...

The field of digital libraries has been attracting many research efforts during the last years. Many interesting projects have been started, dealing with the various open issues arising in the field. However, no project has specifically taken into account the problem of building a digital library of newspaper clippings. It is well known that a huge...

Video segmentation is the most fundamental process for appropriate index­ ing and retrieval of video intervals. In general, video streams are composed 1 of shots delimited by physical shot boundaries. Substantial work has been done on how to detect such shot boundaries automatically (Arman et aI. , 1993) (Zhang et aI. , 1993) (Zhang et aI. , 1995)...

Enlarging and improving the fruition of national cultural heritage is becoming a crucial goal for many nations, obviously including Italy, which owns the larger set of ancient findings of the world. The Plinius project is part of this goal. In particular, it concentrates on the archaeological heritage of the Pompei site with a twofold objective. On...

We consider the problem of automatically visualizing information contained in a database and propose a framework that addresses the issues involved. Our approach does not depend on the particular data model used, the size of the instance set, or the nature of the data being represented. The aim of the framework is to produce a correct, complete, an...

In this paper we present a novel approach to accessing the Web, that enables for automatically acquiring data from Web sites and making them accessible to the user through a database query paradigm. The basic idea is to build, once the user has specified a generic domain of interest, the domain conceptual representation, to instantiate it with data...

The open growth of the Internet, the amount of available information, and the typical access modality (i.e., browsing) cause the puzzled user to search for the information of interest in a labyrinth of links.Web-at-a-Glance (WAG) is a system aiming to allow the user to query (instead of browsing) the Web. The basic idea is to build, once the user h...

The Internet revolution has made an enormous quantity of information available to a disparate variety of people. The amount of information, the typical access modality (that is, browsing), and the rapid growth of the Net, force the user, while searching for the information of interest, to dip into multiple sources, in a labyrinth of millions of lin...

Web-at-a-Glance (WAG) is a system to assist the user in information retrieval and discovery by gleaning the most relevant information from a web site or several web sites. This paper presents this new approach for intelligent information retrieval from web sites, and describes the prototyping of the lightweight WAG system as an active index system.

The Internet has made available an enormous quantity of information to a disparate variety of people. The amount of information, the typical access modality (i.e. browsing), and the open growth of the Net, force the puzzled user to search the information of interest in a labyrinth of billions of links. This is very different from traditional databa...

Recent years have seen the publication of several methodologies for query processing in a Multidatabase (MDB) environment. Whilst different approaches are pertinent to specific CIS architectures, the issue of efficiency of processing has received relatively little attention. This is somewhat surprising considering the potentially large costs associ...

During the past few years our research efforts have been inspired by two different needs. On one hand, the number of non-expert users accessing databases is growing apace. On the other, information systems will no longer be characterized by a single centralized architecture, but rather by several heterogeneous component systems. In order to address...

Visual query systems (VQSs) are query systems for databases that use visual representations to depict the domain of interest and express related requests. VQSs can be seen as an evolution of query languages adopted into database management systems; they are designed to improve the effectiveness of the human-computer communication. Thus, their most...

We describe a logic language to formally express interdependencies between classes belonging to different schemas, the so- called interschema knowledge. These interdependencies allow a designer of a multidatabase (MDB) to establish relationships between both the intensional definition and the set of instances of classes represented in different sch...

Information visualization, an increasingly important subdiscipline within the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) [13], focuses on visual mechanisms designed to communicate clearly to the user the structure of information and improve on the cost of access to large data repositories. In printed form, information visualization has included the...

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We describe an approach for multiparadigmatic visual access to databases, which is proposed to achieve seamless integration of different interaction paradigms. The user is provided with an adaptive interface augmented by a user model, supporting different visual representations of both data and queries. The visual representations are characterized...

The need for better human-computer interaction (HCI) has been widely recognized and discussed, even in the database area. It is generally accepted that the quality of the interaction mainly depends on the interface characteristics. How does one recognize "good" interfaces? The use of a suitable metaphor is crucial. Unfortunately, to put it as a met...

The importance of designing query system which are effective and easy to use has been widely recognized in the database area. Also, it is well known that the adequacy of a system can be mainly tested against actual users in a well settled experiment. However, very few such experiments have been conducted. The overall objective of our study is to me...

Visual Query System (VQS) is a suitable interface to a cooperative information system, as its users often have no knowledge of the structure or location of the data. However queries issued through a VQS may be translated into inefficient queries to the component systems, if the semantics of the system are not considered. In this paper, we present t...

1. Motivation A central development in the database area concerns tools that allow non expert users to understand and easily extract information from a database. Fourth generation query languages, although non-procedural, are not friendly enough for a casual user who must know both the logical structure of the database and the syntax and semantics...

The problem of expressing complex queries in a friendly way is particularly relevant due to the growing diffusion of databases. However, the most significant proposals for extending the expressive power of the relational query languages are based on the logical paradigm. In particular, an extension of the Horn clause queries, i.e. the so-called str...

A number of interfaces, based on different techniques which better exploit the human senses, have been recently suggested and implemented so enlarging the bandwith of the man-machine communication channel. The availability of graphical devices at low cost has given rise to a large diffusion of visual interfaces. The database field is particularly s...

Visual Query Systems (VQS) are query systems using visual representations to denote the domain of interest and express related requests; they may be seen as an evolution of query languages adopted in database management systems. VQS are investigated to solve present day problems of conventional query systems. The most significant needs are: to prov...

One of the main developments in the database area concerns tools that provide a non expert user with a simple understanding of the database content, and a friendly extraction of information from the database. Moreover, the user often needs data at different aggregation levels, as a result of continuing operations or for statistical analysis. This i...

A system to query databases using diagrams as a standard user interface is proposed. The system, called Query by Diagram* (QBD*), makes use of a conceptual data model, a query language on this model, and a graphical user interface. The conceptual model is the entity-relationship model. The query language, whose expressive power allows recursive que...

The need of a friendly man-machine interaction is becoming crucial for a large variety of applications, in particular, those requiring frequent extraction of information from the database. Experience suggests that traditional query languages are not friendly enough for the casual user: she/he is requested to formulate queries in a textual language,...

Recent research activities show a growing interest in statistical databases. Such interest is motivated by the increasing number of statistical applications and the inadequacies of traditional database languages and interfaces for statistical applications. An outstanding open problem in statistical database development is how to express aggregate d...

Tremendous technological breakthroughs have virtually revolutionized the world. One major consequence is that humans are confronted with ever-increasing already massive amounts of data at virtually every turn. Visual data mining (VDM) intends to exploit effective visual strategies in the entire process of mining knowledge. Though there have been ma...