Approach to Problems of Developing a Browsing System of Multilingual Metadata

Abstract

　The Research Center for Knowledge Communities at University of Tsukuba introduced the Knowledge Community Information System (KCIS) in February 2003. KCIS inherited the metadata of the digital library system of the University of Library and Information Science (ULIS-DL). In KCIS, metadata are able to be written in several languages because they are expressed in XML and Unicode. The browsing system of metadata of ULIS-DL were designed to handle metadata written in Japanese. This paper discusses problems of applying the browsing system to multilingual metadata. One of the problems is that the system extracts words from metadata with Japanese morphological analyzer. Another problem is synonyms between different languages. This paper describes a prototype system which are developed to make the issues clear. It also describes development of a experimental system to display multilingual XML documents. It is needed for using the browsing system of metadata with lightweight terminals.