Problem:
How best to integrate paper and electronic documents.
Solution:
The digital desk tries to bridge the gap between your desk--cluttered with paper
memos, newspapers, and magazines--and your PC. A video camera mounted over the workspace scans paper pages within a specific zone without you having to move them from the desk.
Technical challenge:
To maintain the relationship between the real document and the scanned image.
Benefit:
It's easy to combine electronic and paper documents in work-flow and document management applications.
The Virtual Library
Problem:
How to archive, search, and retrieve multilingual documents at high speeds.
Solution:
The Callimaque/XDOD virtual library system indexes and cross-references a document's content as well as its structure. It's based on a client/server environment. The library system, implemented at France's Institut d'Informatique et Mathematique Applique, allows researchers around the world to electronically access papers published since the early 1950s. The system offers on-the-fly translation
of a document's French-language abstract into English.
Technical challenge:
High-speed electronic document distribution and context-sensitive translation.
Benefit:
Opening up foreign-language archives to English speakers.
Knowledge Broker Services
Problem:
To efficiently manage and retrieve electronic information on the Web or in any other digital library.
Solution:
Constraint-based knowledge broker services watch for information that meets preestablished natural-language criteria (e.g., "find all books written by Umberto Eco that are not novels"). They create compound documents on-the-fly and are able to reuse retrieved information.
Technical challenge:
To explain the complex semantics of natural language to broker agents.
Benefit:
Distributed data sources such as the Web and on-line libraries become much easier to use.
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The digital desk brings both paper and electronic documents under the control of a single computer system.
1.
Video camera mounted over workspace scans paperwork on desk.
2.
Image-processing software converts video information to a monochrome image.
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Knowledge Brokers will bring natural language searches to the Web.
Paper-to-Computer Link
