hello all -

as we start to coast through january into february, DLF Central
is beginning to glance with increasing focus on the upcoming
Spring Forum. Spr 08 will be held in Minneapolis, MN, from
Monday Apr 28 through Wed Apr 30, at the Hyatt Regency.

in the coming weeks, we'll provide a formal call for papers.
however, it's *not* too early to begin thinking of topics and
things that you would like to see appear, whether progress
reports or information on new initiatives.

the forum will remain an open submission. however, we will
will be attempting to create specific groups of papers in the
following areas:

1. user experience. this should be construed more broadly than
UI issues, including also user navigation, interaction, and site
or app functionality for user manipulation. non web apps (e.g.,
flash, air, silverlight) would be eagerly considered. innovative
user navigation tools across large data compilations, e.g.,
seadragon, are of particular interest. (n.b.: faceted browsing,
unless combined with newer functionality, is of less interest,
as are other now routine efforts in search result navigation).
experiments with new online social information systems such
as Twitter would also fall into this category.

2. data management. this would include cyberinfrastructure or
e-science applications which involve assistive data management
or computation; real time data curation or metadata generation
from sensed inputs (e.g. astronomical, ecological, biological,
etc); and data modeling. experiments or speculations on the
utility of semantic based applications, such as the SIMILE family
at MIT, or use of commercial applications such as Freebase or
Twine, are of very high interest.

3. large scale architectures. this includes topics relating to the
development of massive data and compute stores, particularly
those involving "cloud computing" and external, virtualized
services such as S3, sun grid services, microsoft virtual servers,
and so forth. implementations of mapreduce clones, hadoop,
and similar tools are of interest. experimentation with online
network based and distributed applications (ie software-as-a-
service models) would be well received. topic also includes
preservation architectures, particularly those engineered to
support near-unbounded scaling.

4. GIS. broadly defined. interest in mapping based overlays of
historical tabulated or non-textual data; integration of textual
and non-textual resources with geographic or mapping
infrastructures; utilization of GIS for computationally based
research; generation of virtual earth based user or avatar
navigation against rich or deep resource collections (might
also be included in user experience category); and so forth.

5. user generated metadata. very interested in applications
exploring the mining and re-use of user generated content,
particularly metadata (broadly defined), such as that invited by
the Library of Congress in their Flickr Commons experiment;
UGC supporting LibraryThing, OpenLibrary, and other wide-scale
bibliographic systems; re-use (not just collection of) user-based
citation application data; applications that take advantage of
generated user data, such as usage data, "social graphs",
collaborative filtering, etc., for recommending or other
enhancement of information discovery and management.

and as I said earlier, DLF anticipates that there may be many
unexpected or new systems or reports that our community
will have interest in hearing about.

get them presentation thinking engines warmed up!

take care -

--
__________________________________________________
peter brantley - executive director
digital library federation | http://www.diglib.org
__________________________________________________
cell: +1-510-599-5159 | office: +1-510-643-8665