Description: This report discusses the Z39.50 interoperability testbed project, phase 2. Abstract: The U.S. Federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) awarded a National Leadership Grant in 2000 to support the research and demonstration project, 'Realizing the Vision of Networked Access to Library Resources: An Applied Research Demonstration Project to Establish and Operate a Z39.50 Interoperability Testbed.' In the project team's December 31, 2003 interim status report on the Z39.50 Interoperability Testbed Project (Z-Interop), the project team highlighted the challenges of individual libraries to participate in the Z-Interop testbed and the project team suggested an alternative method for interoperability testing for Z39.50 servers that could accommodate the limitations of individual library systems. In May, 2004, IMLS awarded an extension to the Z-Interop Project for additional research to develop and test an alternative approach for interoperability testing and also awarded approximately $50,000 in additional funding to carry out the research. The project team refers to this extension to the original award as Z-Interop Phase 2 or Z-Interop2. Research during Z-Interop2 built on the conceptual and technical infrastructure developed during the Z-Interop Project.

Description: Abstract: This paper describes our participation in the NTCIR-5 CLQA task. Three runs were officially submitted for three subtasks: Chinese Question Answering, English-Chinese Question Answering, and Chinese-English Question Answering. We expanded their TREC experimental QA system EagleQA this year to include Chinese QA and Cross-Language QA capabilities. Various information retrieval and natural language processing tools were incorporated with their home-built programs such as Answer Type Identification, Sentence Extraction, and Answer Finding to find answers to the test questions. Future development will focus on investigating effective question translation and answer finding solutions.

Description: This presentation discusses radioactive metadata records and an interoperability testing approach based on metadata utilization. The research is part of Z-Interop, an Institute of Museum and Library Sciences' (IMLS) National Leadership Grant supported project.

Description: This presentation is about interoperability testing. Abstract: Assessing interoperability in the networked information services and applications environment presents difficult challenges due in part to the multi-level and multi-faceted aspects of interoperability. Recent research to establish an interoperability testbed in the context of Z39.50 protocol clients and servers and online catalog applications identified threats to interoperability and defined a question space for interoperability testing. This paper reports on follow-up research to develop an alternative approach for interoperability testing in the context of networked information retrieval that uses specially designated diagnostic records. These records, referred to as radioactive records, enable interoperability testing for other metadata and protocol application environments. The resulting interoperability testbed incorporates additional components to exploit automatic processes for interoperability testing and assessment, thus improving the efficiency of interoperability testing.

Description: Call Number, is the newsletter of the School of Library and Information Sciences, University of North Texas. The periodical contains information about professors, news in the department, and the school's alumni.