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(Search the OED)
The Centre for the New Oxford English Dictionary and Text Research
serves as a focal point for studying text management within the context
of the Database
Research Group within the School of Computer
Science, Faculty of
Mathematics at the University of
Waterloo.
In January 1985, the University of Waterloo established the Centre
for the New OED to fulfill its obligations under an agreement with the Oxford University Press to computerize
the OED. The fundamental goal of the Centre remains to
support innovative research through the development of
application-driven text management software.
In 1989, the Oxford University Press published the 20-volume Oxford
English Dictionary, second edition. As a joint venture with the
Press, the University of Waterloo designed an on-line dictionary
database that is suitable for editors charged with maintaining the OED,
lexicographers working on other dictionaries, and researchers who wish
to consult the OED interactively.
The project adopted the philosophy of modern text markup systems
that a computer-processable version of text is well-represented by
interleaving ``tags'' with the text of the original document, still
leaving the original words in proper sequence. In its simplest
interpretation, by suppressing the tags we are left with the original
text, and by converting the tags to formatting instructions we can
produce a suitable presentation of the text.
The most visibly successful aspect of our research is embodied in
the flexible and efficient search and display software.
LECTOR is a general purpose browser that takes as input a stream of
arbitrarilty tagged text and formats it to the screen through
user-defined typography reflecting its structure. As a complementary
software component, the PAT text search engine efficiently retrieves all
occurrences of words or phrases appearing in the 570-megabyte OED
in less than 1 second, and allows users to restrict queries and results
to arbitrary structured text fragments. Used together, PAT and LECTOR
form a powerful query facility for text-dominated databases.
While the research continues at the University, the tangible results
are further developed and commercialized by Open Text Corporation, a spin-off
company located in Waterloo.
The Centre was an active member of CSSC, the Canadian Strategic
Software Consortium, formed in 1994 to conduct pre-competitive research
leading to database management systems that integrate structured text
and relational data.
Our prototype distributed
federated database system allowed integrated data access via the
Oracle (Oracle) and DB2 (IBM) relational database systems and the
SearchServer (Fulcrum), PAT (Open Text), and MultiText (UW) text
engines. A fundamental goal of this research is the creation of good standards for
managing and manipulating text. Such standards encourage and facilitate
software interoperability and thus cooperation between between software
vendors, developers, and integrators.
Principal research interests include, but are not limited to:
- SGML and SQL,
- management of text through grammars,
- integration of text and relations,
- federated database technology,
- database optimization, and
- update of text.
This project explored the use of powerful retrieval engines that
combine fast text search with the power of structured data retrieval to
support resource discovery.
Currently users of the World Wide Web issue queries against one or
more indexing sites and browse through long lists of page references. As
the internet grows in size and as more and more data is not converted to
HTML until requested by users via query forms, monolithic indexing of
the Web becomes less effective in meeting users' needs. Locating
information is better achieved by characterizing resources (that is,
extracting profile templates that describe data sources and indexed
data), distributing and communicating resulting descriptions, and
flexibly searching multiple, diverse template databases.
A simple user query can be transmitted to several sites (chosen by
an appropriate site selection process) by a program that sits behind the
browser. At each site a backend program transforms the query into
several queries specific to the particular index, issues the queries,
and packages the query responses into an appropriately rich structure.
The frontend then provides facilities to the browser for examining the
structured response and preparing subsequent refinements to the queries.
The goal is to help users to find specific query forms to be used in
conjunction with specific data resources to serve their information
needs.
The resulting infrastructure provides scalability in terms of sites,
data volume and heterogeneity of document collections.
Research Group
Adjunct and past members
- Nolan Andres, PeaceWorks Consulting
- G. Elizabeth Blake
- Tim Bray,
Sun Microsystems
- Lauri Brown
- Hai (Helena) Chan
- Prof. Mariano Consens, University of Toronto
- Dr. Ian Davis
- Heather Fawcett, Information Design Solutions
- Mary
Ellen Foster, University of Edinburgh
- Prof. Gaston
Gonnet, ETH Zürich
- Ben Hui
- Prof. Pekka
Kilpeläinen, University of Kuopio
- Prof. Eila Kuikka, University of Kuopio (deceased)
- Zarrin Langari
- Dr.
Per-Åke (Paul) Larson, Microsoft Corporation
- Sheng (Patrick) Li, Keane Corporation
- Kar-Yan Ng, Siebel Systems
- Chris Palmer,
Carnegie-Mellon University
- Dr. Darrell Raymond,
Gateway Group
- Prof. Airi Salminen,
University of Jyväskylä
- Tim Snider, Freedom Intelligence
- Dr. Xuerong Tang
- George Townsend, Algoma
University
- Elizabeth Tudhope,
Stargazer Software
- Hemin Xiao, Microsoft Corp.
- Tony (Tongyan) Wang, Syndesis Ltd.
- Prof.
Masatoshi Yoshikawa, Kyoto University
- Dr. Matthew Young-Lai, iAnywhere Solutions
- Dr. Hui Zhang, University of Manitoba
- Dr. Mei Zhou,
PrinterOn Corp.
For further information about the Centre, the New OED project, the
T/RDBMS project, the ReDWooD project, the software, or any related
activities, please direct inquiries to:
Professor Frank Tompa
School of Computer Science
University of Waterloo
200 University Avenue West
Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G1
CANADA
(519) 888-4567 ext. 4675
fax: (519) 885-1208
email: fwtompa@uwaterloo.ca
Maintainer
Frank Tompa
10 November 2005