Alejandro Bia | Universidad Miguel Hernandez (original) (raw)

Papers by Alejandro Bia

This article describes the requirements and technological solutions adopted by the National Libra... more This article describes the requirements and technological solutions adopted by the National Library of Spain for its Digital Library section concerning metadata. It also discusses different approaches for metadata handling in general. ♣

Electronic publishing makes it possible to reach every corner of the world and opens up new resea... more Electronic publishing makes it possible to reach every corner of the world and opens up new research and communication paths. In this article we describe the production model and implementation of an electronic news service for a DL, that manages altogether five different DL-newsletters plus a monthly journal, each one of them delivered in several optional output formats, and all managed and produced based on XML-TEI and XSLT technology. Articles and news may appear in different newsletters and/or the journal, and they have different periodicity (some are published quarterly and some monthly). The news and articles come from different sources, which generally coincide with departments or units of the DL. A general editor reviews the articles or news, decides where must they appear, and also manages the distribution lists. The newsletters are not preserved, but the most relevant news and articles are published in the monthly journal called Dulcinea, which is published through Interne...

The largest effort in the area of standardisation of computer encoding of language resources has ... more The largest effort in the area of standardisation of computer encoding of language resources has been the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), established in 1987. TEI chose as its underlying standard SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), and in the years before the inception of XML, a number of projects encoded their data according to some SGML DTD, TEI compliant, or otherwise. These projects could now benefit from migrating their data to XML. Apart from validation, the most compelling reason for migration is the scarcity of SGML-aware software and the abundance of XML-based tools and related recommendations. However, despite the fact that XML is a subset of SGML, migration is not a trivial process, especially in the case of large holdings of legacy language resources. This is why in 2002 the TEI Consortium established a Task Force on SGML to XML migration. The TF has now produced a number of reports that simplify and make explicit the conversion of SGML TEI (version P3) to XML T...

According to [1] Internet is a market with many micromarkets, based on needs, interests and trend... more According to [1] Internet is a market with many micromarkets, based on needs, interests and trends, both personal and professional. Each and every space of the net is atomized to reach the users, with their own preferences and behaviors. Our DL project intends to give the users a customized view where they could receive personalized information. We describe the goals and design ideas followed in our customization project.

Digital Libraries of literary works usually store a huge amount of textual information. It is obv... more Digital Libraries of literary works usually store a huge amount of textual information. It is obvious that the mere accumulation of texts leads only to a limited-use library. Hence the need for eÆcient information retrieval services. The use of indices to speed up the search is advisable in cases like ours, the \Miguel de Cervantes" digital library, where the text collection is relatively large (4000 books at present) and semi-static (updated at reasonably large intervals). We developed a catalog search engine based on tries that performs fast searches with eÆcient results. However the size of the trie structures is quite big, proving adequate for catalog searches, but not for whole text indexing.

El metodo Software Factory (SF) consiste en llevar a cabo acciones y aplicar herramientas informa... more El metodo Software Factory (SF) consiste en llevar a cabo acciones y aplicar herramientas informaticas, con dos finalidades: (1) hacer que las practicas de asignaturas tecnologicas (en un sentido amplio) sean lo mas parecidas que sea posible al trabajo real en la empresa o la industria y (2) difundir el uso de herramientas Web que permitan nuevas formas de trabajo agiles y dinamicas, como por ejemplo el teletrabajo, el trabajo movil y el trabajo colaborativo a distancia. Este articulo describe las experiencias de los autores en este sentido.

In this paper we are introducing the MatchDetectReveal system, which is capable of identifying th... more In this paper we are introducing the MatchDetectReveal system, which is capable of identifying the similarity between documents. Different applications of the system are discussed including cross-referencing multiple editions of literary works, plagiarism detection, organizing collections of documents and comparative analysis of texts. The system uses suffix trees and suffix vectors for comparing documents. These data structures are very fast and powerful, which allows fast comparison of documents. The front-end of the system is fully Web-based, thus users only need to use a Web browser to access the system. The results are also presented as HTML files utilising the hyperlink capabilities of HTML documents.

We describe the digital-book-production flow of the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library, from boo... more We describe the digital-book-production flow of the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library, from book acquisition up to Internet publishing, highlighting the main requirements and design considerations of the workflow system.

The purpose of this article is to describe our approach to the massive production of facsimile-ty... more The purpose of this article is to describe our approach to the massive production of facsimile-type hypertext books that contain digital images of manuscripts and old printings to be published on the Internet as one of our DL services . The goal of this project is to offer an easy-to-use interface that allows customizable views of facsimile images of book pages in several sizes and formats with transcriptions that are offered in three forms: Madison style, normal, and modernized. We explain the hypertext design, and the time-saving production methodology we use.

Most often, Digital Libraries have the need to extract information from poorly marked-up document... more Most often, Digital Libraries have the need to extract information from poorly marked-up documents to fill databases or create new hypertext documents with a highly structured markup. In this work, we approach the problem of extracting bibliographic information from literary reports in HTML format to fill a Digital Library database of Galician publications used for Internet searchs. An information extraction approach that takes advantage of both HTML markup and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques was successfully used for this purpose.

2017 IEEE/ACM 1st International Workshop on Software Engineering Curricula for Millennials (SECM)

Education methods for millennials must accommodate their expectations and behaviors. Active learn... more Education methods for millennials must accommodate their expectations and behaviors. Active learning methodologies seem to be adequate for this requirement. In particular, in this paper, we discuss the design and deployment of Team-Based Learning (TBL) in two undergraduate Software Engineering courses. TBL is a type of Active Learning Methodology that makes extensive use of small groups to accommodate learning and empower students with the learning responsibilities in the classroom. This paper describes our concerns and the decisions we made when designing two TBL courses at ORT University. Furthermore, we evaluated the results of our deployment and compared them with published results. Our results are aligned with the expectations inferred from the literature. Students had a positive perception of the methodology and the learning outcomes.

Педагогически форум

The role of technical standards (TS) has become increasingly important for engineering over the p... more The role of technical standards (TS) has become increasingly important for engineering over the past years. Nowadays, undergraduates are not only our future colleagues in industry and academia, but they also constitute the future workforce of a very significant part of the industry. The accomplishments of professional activities require a correct understanding of the role of technical standards applied to the industry, especially within the computing and the telecommunications fields. One of the challenges is to find the right way to introduce technical standards to enhance the learning experience by pointing students to the best practices of the industry. We found a stimulating alternative to overcome this challenge through the IEEE Student Branch Program. This paper presents one case of success, the IEEE's Student Branch in Spain during 2014, 2015 and 2017 and the Exemplary Student Branch Award (2017 to 2019) of Region 8 (Europe, Middle East and Africa).

This paper describes the engineering foundations of VisualWADE, a CASE tool to automate the produ... more This paper describes the engineering foundations of VisualWADE, a CASE tool to automate the production of Web applications. VisualWADE follows a model-driven approach focusing on requirements analysis, high level design, and rapid prototyping. In this way, an application evolves smoothly from the first prototype to the final product, and its maintenance is a natural consequence of development. The paper also discusses the lessons learned in the development of the tool and its application to several case studies in the industrial context.

Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems, 2005

International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, Sep 12, 2005

International Journal of Neural Systems, 2002

This article describes the requirements and technological solutions adopted by the National Libra... more This article describes the requirements and technological solutions adopted by the National Library of Spain for its Digital Library section concerning metadata. It also discusses different approaches for metadata handling in general. ♣

Electronic publishing makes it possible to reach every corner of the world and opens up new resea... more Electronic publishing makes it possible to reach every corner of the world and opens up new research and communication paths. In this article we describe the production model and implementation of an electronic news service for a DL, that manages altogether five different DL-newsletters plus a monthly journal, each one of them delivered in several optional output formats, and all managed and produced based on XML-TEI and XSLT technology. Articles and news may appear in different newsletters and/or the journal, and they have different periodicity (some are published quarterly and some monthly). The news and articles come from different sources, which generally coincide with departments or units of the DL. A general editor reviews the articles or news, decides where must they appear, and also manages the distribution lists. The newsletters are not preserved, but the most relevant news and articles are published in the monthly journal called Dulcinea, which is published through Interne...

The largest effort in the area of standardisation of computer encoding of language resources has ... more The largest effort in the area of standardisation of computer encoding of language resources has been the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), established in 1987. TEI chose as its underlying standard SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), and in the years before the inception of XML, a number of projects encoded their data according to some SGML DTD, TEI compliant, or otherwise. These projects could now benefit from migrating their data to XML. Apart from validation, the most compelling reason for migration is the scarcity of SGML-aware software and the abundance of XML-based tools and related recommendations. However, despite the fact that XML is a subset of SGML, migration is not a trivial process, especially in the case of large holdings of legacy language resources. This is why in 2002 the TEI Consortium established a Task Force on SGML to XML migration. The TF has now produced a number of reports that simplify and make explicit the conversion of SGML TEI (version P3) to XML T...

According to [1] Internet is a market with many micromarkets, based on needs, interests and trend... more According to [1] Internet is a market with many micromarkets, based on needs, interests and trends, both personal and professional. Each and every space of the net is atomized to reach the users, with their own preferences and behaviors. Our DL project intends to give the users a customized view where they could receive personalized information. We describe the goals and design ideas followed in our customization project.

Digital Libraries of literary works usually store a huge amount of textual information. It is obv... more Digital Libraries of literary works usually store a huge amount of textual information. It is obvious that the mere accumulation of texts leads only to a limited-use library. Hence the need for eÆcient information retrieval services. The use of indices to speed up the search is advisable in cases like ours, the \Miguel de Cervantes" digital library, where the text collection is relatively large (4000 books at present) and semi-static (updated at reasonably large intervals). We developed a catalog search engine based on tries that performs fast searches with eÆcient results. However the size of the trie structures is quite big, proving adequate for catalog searches, but not for whole text indexing.

El metodo Software Factory (SF) consiste en llevar a cabo acciones y aplicar herramientas informa... more El metodo Software Factory (SF) consiste en llevar a cabo acciones y aplicar herramientas informaticas, con dos finalidades: (1) hacer que las practicas de asignaturas tecnologicas (en un sentido amplio) sean lo mas parecidas que sea posible al trabajo real en la empresa o la industria y (2) difundir el uso de herramientas Web que permitan nuevas formas de trabajo agiles y dinamicas, como por ejemplo el teletrabajo, el trabajo movil y el trabajo colaborativo a distancia. Este articulo describe las experiencias de los autores en este sentido.

In this paper we are introducing the MatchDetectReveal system, which is capable of identifying th... more In this paper we are introducing the MatchDetectReveal system, which is capable of identifying the similarity between documents. Different applications of the system are discussed including cross-referencing multiple editions of literary works, plagiarism detection, organizing collections of documents and comparative analysis of texts. The system uses suffix trees and suffix vectors for comparing documents. These data structures are very fast and powerful, which allows fast comparison of documents. The front-end of the system is fully Web-based, thus users only need to use a Web browser to access the system. The results are also presented as HTML files utilising the hyperlink capabilities of HTML documents.

We describe the digital-book-production flow of the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library, from boo... more We describe the digital-book-production flow of the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library, from book acquisition up to Internet publishing, highlighting the main requirements and design considerations of the workflow system.

The purpose of this article is to describe our approach to the massive production of facsimile-ty... more The purpose of this article is to describe our approach to the massive production of facsimile-type hypertext books that contain digital images of manuscripts and old printings to be published on the Internet as one of our DL services . The goal of this project is to offer an easy-to-use interface that allows customizable views of facsimile images of book pages in several sizes and formats with transcriptions that are offered in three forms: Madison style, normal, and modernized. We explain the hypertext design, and the time-saving production methodology we use.

Most often, Digital Libraries have the need to extract information from poorly marked-up document... more Most often, Digital Libraries have the need to extract information from poorly marked-up documents to fill databases or create new hypertext documents with a highly structured markup. In this work, we approach the problem of extracting bibliographic information from literary reports in HTML format to fill a Digital Library database of Galician publications used for Internet searchs. An information extraction approach that takes advantage of both HTML markup and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques was successfully used for this purpose.

2017 IEEE/ACM 1st International Workshop on Software Engineering Curricula for Millennials (SECM)

Education methods for millennials must accommodate their expectations and behaviors. Active learn... more Education methods for millennials must accommodate their expectations and behaviors. Active learning methodologies seem to be adequate for this requirement. In particular, in this paper, we discuss the design and deployment of Team-Based Learning (TBL) in two undergraduate Software Engineering courses. TBL is a type of Active Learning Methodology that makes extensive use of small groups to accommodate learning and empower students with the learning responsibilities in the classroom. This paper describes our concerns and the decisions we made when designing two TBL courses at ORT University. Furthermore, we evaluated the results of our deployment and compared them with published results. Our results are aligned with the expectations inferred from the literature. Students had a positive perception of the methodology and the learning outcomes.

Педагогически форум

The role of technical standards (TS) has become increasingly important for engineering over the p... more The role of technical standards (TS) has become increasingly important for engineering over the past years. Nowadays, undergraduates are not only our future colleagues in industry and academia, but they also constitute the future workforce of a very significant part of the industry. The accomplishments of professional activities require a correct understanding of the role of technical standards applied to the industry, especially within the computing and the telecommunications fields. One of the challenges is to find the right way to introduce technical standards to enhance the learning experience by pointing students to the best practices of the industry. We found a stimulating alternative to overcome this challenge through the IEEE Student Branch Program. This paper presents one case of success, the IEEE's Student Branch in Spain during 2014, 2015 and 2017 and the Exemplary Student Branch Award (2017 to 2019) of Region 8 (Europe, Middle East and Africa).

This paper describes the engineering foundations of VisualWADE, a CASE tool to automate the produ... more This paper describes the engineering foundations of VisualWADE, a CASE tool to automate the production of Web applications. VisualWADE follows a model-driven approach focusing on requirements analysis, high level design, and rapid prototyping. In this way, an application evolves smoothly from the first prototype to the final product, and its maintenance is a natural consequence of development. The paper also discusses the lessons learned in the development of the tool and its application to several case studies in the industrial context.

Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems, 2005

International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, Sep 12, 2005

International Journal of Neural Systems, 2002