Digital Libraries: What Type Of Documents Should We Be Dealing With?

As if large collections of purely textual documents would not still pose a rich set of research challenges (i.e., robust and reliable algorithms for structuring, content extraction and information filtering) for generations of researchers this presentation advocates a change in the interpretation of the term ’document’: Rather than seeing a document in a classical context of being a ’paper’ predominantly compiled of text with a few figures interspersed we recommend to adopt a more general view which considers a ’document’ as an entity consisting of any media type appropriate to store or exchange information in a given context. Only this shift in the document paradigm will open new application fields to Digital Library (DL) technology for the mutual benefit of DL’s and application domains: DL’s offering an unprecedented level of functionality and (new) application domains (e.g., digital mock-up in engineering) benefiting from a more powerful DL technology. According to a study by Lyman et al [3] the world produces between 1 and 2 exabytes (i.e., 1018 bytes or a billion gigabytes) of unique information per year. From that vast amount of data printed documents of all kinds only comprise 0.003%. The major share being taken by images, animations, sound, 3D models and other numeric data. Of course, a large an increasing proportion of the produced material is created, stored and exchanged in digital form -­ currently ranging at about 90% of the total. Yet, little of this information is accessible through Digital Library collections. This presentation gives a motivation for a ’generalized view’ on the term document and raises several issues stimulating research work in the field of Computer Graphics to make Digital Libraries of the future more accessible.