P-News

The project aims at the construction of a situation aware and personalized recommender system for MPEG-7 digital libraries.

Project related publications

The constant increase of new literature in today's libraries pose a more and more demanding problem, since it has become impossible to inform individual users about new literature on their specific interests. Users which need to follow the relevant literature in their field, have the choice of browsing through all new literature and reading lots of irrelevant documents (or at least abstracts) or risk to miss important developments. Technical key prerequisites to overcome this problem are improvements in the field of digital libraries together with the use of universal document formats like the XML dialect MPEG-7.

The crucial capability, however, is to model and implement information systems that allows for advanced personalization. Thus a major task will be the appropriate modeling of user preferences and their sophisticated integration into powerful search engines. The personalized news service P-News aims at providing an extensive preference based solution to this problem. Since the upcoming MPEG-7 standard is expected to store lots of meta-data together with (multimedia-) documents, preferences in the domain of digital libraries can always be based on attributes or on full-texts. All the preferences of a specific user can then be used to compose an adequate query individually determining the most relevant documents for this user. Thus with P-News the problem of informing users about new developments in their specific area of interest could be solved for the first time.

P-NEWS in a sketch:

The P-News framework aims to provide leading-edge database technology for the use in digital libraries. Since January 2002 P-News is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the strategic research program "Distributed Processing and Exchange of Digital Documents (V3D2)". This project is carried out by the Institute of Computer Science of the University of Augsburg.