AUGMENTATION OF THE RESOURCES OF THE PROJECT

Apart from the significant addition to the project's resources in terms of personnel, equipment, and software that have accrued from interactions with our partners, as described above, the project has received significant augmentations of its base funding in terms of the following awards and contributions.

In particular we note the following awards:

1. NSF provided supplementary funds of $111,847 over one year, commencing November 1996, to support a joint set of activities involving the UCSB and Illinois DLI projects. The title of the project is Supplement to Alexandria DLI Project: A Semantic Interoperability Experiment for Spatially-Oriented Multimedia Data. The Co-PI's on this project are Hsinchun Chen of University of Arizona and Terence Smith of ADL. The focus of the project's activities is semantic interoperability for georeferenced materials. The researchers are investigating concept spaces and self-organizing map (SOM) techniques for the generation of visual thesauri for geospatial applications. A testbed of several hundred aerial photos has been created and will grow to a few thousand by mid 1997. The collection has been analyzed using the NCSA SGI Power Challenge and Convex Exemplar supercomputers. A Java based interface for viewing visual thesaurus is also under development at Chen's lab.

2. The funding by NSF of a proposal entitled A New Generic Indexing Technology for Digital Library Support and submitted by Michael Freeston and Terence Smith. The level of funding is $250K over a three year period, commencing in March 1997. The research that will be carried out is made possible by a series of recent advances in database index design, culminating in the discovery of a general solution of the n-dimensional B-tree problem. The solution of this problem is a key result which opens the way to a whole new generation of database access methods. The primary aim of the project is to develop, disseminate and exploit this new generation.

   A feature of the new indexing technology is its very wide range of applicability - from conventional relations to logic clauses, and from spatial object vectors to pictorial image rasters. An important objective of the project will be to develop support for all these areas within one integrated, generic indexing system. The aim will be to maximize functionality and internal compatibility while maintaining low software complexity.

   The application focus of the project will be the Alexandria digital library project currently being conducted at the University of California, Santa Barbara. At present, this project relies for its indexing support on existing commercial database systems. However, it is clear that the project will demand indexing functionalities well beyond those which existing systems can support. So we propose to run the new project in parallel with the digital library project, monitoring its indexing needs and devising solutions within the new technology.

   Because of the close collaboration between a number of leading commercial database suppliers and the ADL project, the new project will be able to use these established channels of communication to convey the ideas generated in the project and its results directly into the commercial database sector. We do not expect that the software generated in the project - or even the ideas - will be taken over directly into the companies products. But we do anticipate that the project will act as a stimulating focus for future commercial system upgrades, and new systems.

3. The U.S. Navy (NAVO, Stennis) provided $47,700 towards the purchase of the recently-acquired DEC hardware described above, with the award being made through NSF.

4. The U.S. Navy (NRaD, San Diego) provided $23,750 for the support of graduate research assistants.

5. NASA provided $48,800 in partial of support of the activities of Linda Hill (see above).

6. Microsoft provided $62,876 to support personnel in activities relating to the preparation of data for building a 30GB test database (see above).

7. NIMA (CIO) provided $143,100 to support the activities described above, with the award being made through NSF.

• Funding Request Under Consideration
• Unsuccessful Funding Requests
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