In Japan, there has recently been an increasing interest in health, home care and welfare, as we enter into a society occupied by more and more elderly people and a smaller number of younger citizens. The Japanese government and the administrative divisions of Japan, including Tokyo, Hokkaido, Osaka, Kyoto and all the prefectures, have been adopting many kinds of health and welfare policies. As one such policy, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare designated an instrument for blind people and elderly people as a "daily life tool" in April 2003. This instrument translates information printed on paper to voice reading. The Ministry's policy and the associated budget will enable blind people to purchase the instrument with very little cost. Our company developed this instrument, called "SPEECHIO," as well as the new software that converts text to two-dimensional symbol named "SP-CODE." The SPEECHIO reads SP-CODE and changes text into voice reading automatically. We believe this new barrier-free communication system will greatly help blind people and old-aged people who have difficulties in reading small prints. In this article, I describe this system and our ongoing and future activities with the system.

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The rapid advances in digital technologies and networks have radically altered and improved the ways that data can be produced and used in science. The public domain information is defined as sources and types of data and information whose uses are not restricted by intellectual property or other statutory regimes and that are accordingly available to the public for use without authorization or restriction. It is increasing the pressure between the need of science for the free flows of data and information, and the considerations of the intellectual property rights with regards to the same data and information under the digital network environment. It is discussed in the case of the Global Biodiversity Information as the one of academic data and databases how to implicate the intellectual property rights on the databases. The EC Database Directive 1996 is created by a two-tier structure of intellectual property protection for original databases through copyright, and a new sui generis right for other unoriginal databases. In the United States, the bill named the Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act of 2003 (H.R.3261) is now in the process of legislation on the Congress. Where access to information is at issue, it would be necessary to introduce the new model of database rights as balanced with the free flows of academic data and databases in Japan.

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Classification of research fields for the Grants-in-Aid application has been changed a great deal since 2003 fiscal year. Changes in the interdisciplinary and new area are marked especially. It is interesting to find out where the usual research fields are moved to in the new classification. In this study, we focus on Information Science fields which were extended from the three to 11 research fields, and investigate which new research fields have strong relationship with and how they are located in the usual three Information Science fields by making use of those continuing adoption research started before 2002 and by analyzing keywords of research themes as well.

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This paper describes application of Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting: OAI-PMH to information resource sharing. OAP-PMH provides an application-independent interoperability framework to share metadata among information service systems. OAI-PMH allows users to have seamless access to the information resource on the Internet. In this study N an integrated information retrieval system of metadata which was harvested from other systems based on OAI-PMH was constructed.

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In recent years, an information technology has been progressed. And our country is establishing to a highly information-oriented society. Then, the support system to information practical use is aimed to build for personal-use. However, in a meaning of making good use of material information, there are still many inadequate systems. Then, this paper considers the development technique and the state of the support system which surround material information by making into an example the database application system which supports archaeological data research.

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　There exist two types of e-learning systems. One of them aims to improve the education efficiency. Distance lecture system and WBT (Web Based Training) belong to this type. In these systems, interaction between educators and learners become lower than in the conventional classroom teaching. Therefore, these systems cannot improve the education qualities. The other aims to improve the education qualities. The e-learning systems in this type, which are newly developed, notify the educators of the learners' conditions in real-time and support educators' activities. One of these systems automatically lectures using WBT and notifies the educators of the stalled learners and their learning data (exercise answers and questions). Depend on these data, educators concentrate on the education to each stalled learner. Another system is used for the lecture for large number of learners. This system notifies an educator of the learners' exercise advance in real-time. Depend on the data, the educator judges if he gives advices to the learners and if he explains the next item. The e-learning systems have another merit that educators can improve the education methods by analyzing the accumulated education log. As this field is on the way of development, future study is anticipated.

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　A method in an innovation and effects caused by it are described in patent document. We regard the method-caused effect as causal relationship and consider it available to construct creativity support system, therefore we have extracted some causal relationships. In the future, we try integrating hierarchical relationships into causal relationships to construct funcion of analogical reasoning. Therefore, in this work, we extracted hierarchical relationships from patent documents, especially selecting medical field as extracting target.

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Free term search is one of the most effective ways to search text data. However, it is difficult to search for specialized texts such as historical official records, in which there are many specialized terms different from currently used. It is also difficult to compile a thesaurus, which covers all diversified historical terms. This paper proposes one solution using a specialized dictionary compiled for the Japan Center for Asian Historical Records.

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[in Japanese]

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　This paper shows an example of converting XML from RDB data technique as archeological information. In addition, it shows the technique of developing Web-DB application that used XML as an example of application of the XML data.

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　In this paper, we propose to extract the socail network of participants from the information system using their accounting records. We discuss the social network feature. In an environment of information system, it is desirable to provide a user with information depending on a user's situation, such as time, location, user behavior, and social context. Since such information was difficult to gain from system, it was rate to be used. We also dicuss the analysis of social network in the campus computer system.

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　The availability of complete genomic sequence data allows one to develop new methods of reconstructing phylogenetic trees. A simple method of reconstructing branching orders based on gene transposition (or lateral transfer) is presented. It is shown that specific gene arrangements on four different genomes could determine a branching order. A computer search for such gene arrangements was carried out against gene order data of the completely sequenced Gram-positive bacteria, and the results will be discussed.

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We developed a remote aged care system for Hanazono village which is one of the typical underpopulated villages in Japan. In many of such depopulated villages, there is the problem that the number of visiting nurses who provide aged care services is not enough. As a result, visiting nurses can visit aged people not so often (it might be once a week or so), and hence aged people is easy to lose their health. To improve this situation, our system helps visiting nurses get hold of the health condition of aged people by showing the information of their daily health condition which is input everyday by aged people at their own houses. Here, to make a easy input operation even for aged people, we use L-mode terminals at each house and design easy-to-operate Web pages which are accessed by the terminal. We further performed a test operation of our system in Hanazono village and confirmed the effectiveness of our system.

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　We have presented the concept and planning of the project ICJS: International Collaboration for Japanese literary Studies, in the 10th annual conference of JSIK held on 2002 in Tokyo. The project has been started from 2001 as the five-years program, founded by the Grant-in-Aid Scientific Research (S). In this presentation we will generally report on the interim result for three years, and particularly focus on the new collaboration system through feasibility experiments.
　We are now in feasibility studies, an example of simultaneous searching using a Dublin Core meta-database system is shown as follows. The six databases are currently connected to the collaboration system at the NIJL: the microfilm resource directory (a catalog of the microfilm held at the Institute), the old Japanese book directory (a catalog of the manuscripts held at the Institute), the thesis directory (a directory of theses related to Japanese literary research), the historical material location directory (a directory of the places historical resources are held at the Institute), the image database (an image database of materials held at the Institute), and the moving picture database (performing arts video data).
　Then, we have been making arrangements expand and develop enlarge the system to Inter-university or Institute common collaboration system. For example, we will construct among the Institute such as National Museum of Japanese History, International Research Center for Japanese Studies, National Museum of Ethnology, The Historiographical Institute University of Tokyo, Osaka City University and Kyoto University. At the next stage we will be connecting to Italy, France, U.K. U.S., etc.

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