Site: Kyoto University
Yoshida-Honbacki, Sakyo-ku
Kyoto, 606-8501 Japan

Date Visited: 27 March 1998

WTEC Attendess: R.D. Shelton (report author), T. Ager, R. Chellappa, B. Croft, B. Davis-Brown, L. Goldberg, R. Larsen, J. Mendel, H. Morishita, R. Reddy, M. Shamos

Hosts:

BACKGROUND

Professor Nagao has personally conducted and coordinated some of the most important digital information organization research in Japan. Prof. Nagao also helped organize the itinerary for this study by identifying the key sites to visit as he did in 1991 for the WTEC machine translation study tour.

ARIADNE

Prof. Nagao reviewed his design during 1991-1994 of the Ariadne digital library in operation at the Kyoto University Library (Nagao n.d. (b)). Some of the goals for this system were use of the table of contents of journals or books as a search unit, use of a hypertext structure linking documents, convenient browsing functions, and design for networks of digital libraries. Fujitsu implemented this design, which is an example of university-industry cooperation. The demonstration of this system to the WTEC team on March 26 is described in a separate site report.

COPYRIGHT

Prof. Nagao argues that the concept of copyright needs to change in the age of digital libraries. He proposes that everyone should have the right to use, make copies, or to incorporate the work into his by paying a set fee to the author or publisher. While such compulsory licenses are found in other fields, Prof. Nagao would allow the author to set the scale of charges; if there is little demand, the scale would be reduced. Prof. Kitagawa at Kyoto has a grant from the Japan Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS) to implement this concept in a "Copymart."

THE ELECTRONIC BOOK

Prof. Nagao believes that the potential for digital books and libraries will be only realized when a "portable reading device" is developed that has the physical appearance of a conventional publication. He expects that such devices will be on the market in two or three years. The first application might be newspapers whose content is delivered by wireless. The success of digital libraries depends on a reader that looks like a book; a client PC is not a sufficiently attractive interface.

EFFECT ON PUBLISHERS

Prof. Nagao believes that scientific publishing in the future will largely be done by the authors freely posting their papers on the Web for the benefit of colleagues and students. Many authors will bypass publishers entirely unless they offer superior packaging, advertising, and marketing generally. The portable reading device could make it possible for publishers to compete by offering attractive packaging-it would look like a book, but be all electronic.

MACHINE TRANSLATION

Prof. Nagao believes that in 20 years students will be able to hear their lectures from all over the world via networks. Some 20 leading languages will have good machine translation (MT) systems; Japanese-English systems will be especially well developed.

EDUCATION

The National Diet Library (NDL) has some educational features. There is a library at Ueno in Tokyo that is dedicated to children's books; the NDL is converting it to a digital library over the next two years. Kyoto University is using distance learning to bring lectures to the main campus from separate institutes.

OTHER POINTS

The infrastructure for such information systems is in good shape; the difficulty is how to accumulate contents. The Japanese government is not much engaged in coordination in the digital libraries field, except for Ministry of Education (Monbusho) support of several digital libraries, the MITI project, and the National Diet Library. Prof. Nagao believes that the field is at too early a stage for much standardization. He plans to encourage the creation of a second National Diet Library in the Kansai area in 2002 as a vehicle for national and international coordination and standardization. Kyoto University is creating a new school of informatics with 120 professors to house a wide variety of information systems research and development.

REFERENCES

Nagao, Makoto. n.d.(a). Copyright in the age of digital libraries. Fourth IPA Copyright Symposium. Tokyo.

Nagao, Makoto. n.d.(b). Multimedia digital library: Ariadne.