Multilingual Document Brwoser for Digital Lirbraries and its Application

以Netscape Navigator和Internet Explorer为代表的WWW浏览器在世界范围内得到了广泛的应用。这些浏览器被许多数字图书馆项目所接受。然而，WWW和浏览器上提供的多语言功能对于数字图书馆来说是不够的，因为它们一次只能显示一个字符编码的文本，而且客户端通常没有足够的字体来显示其他文档。另一方面，多语言是实现数字图书馆的基本功能。本研究主要从以下几个方面进行了研究：(1)开发了一套检索和浏览多语种文档的软件工具；(2)开发了用户根据环境使用多语种文档的软件工具。调查人员开发了一种名为MHTML(多语言超文本标记语言)的多语种浏览器技术，以及一个用于显示多语种文本的MHTML网关服务器和小程序。他们实现了网关服务器，将源HTML文档转换为MHTML对象，通过Applet在WWW浏览器上显示。该软件对公众开放，可从图书情报大学研究人员维护的WWW站点下载。研究人员开发了以法语、英语和日语编写的日本民间故事的电子文本集。文本与MHTML技术相结合，只有在启用了Java的情况下，才能在任何客户端上查看它们。该藏品也向公众开放。写故事和/或将故事翻译成另一种语言的志愿者正在加入这个项目，不仅是在日本，还有来自世界各地的志愿者。

WWW browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer, are widely used in the world.These browosers are widely accepted as a user interface by many digital library projects.However, the multilingual functions provided on the WWW and the browsers are insufficent for the digital library, because they can display texts encoded in only one character code set at a time and because clients usually do not have sufficient fonts display foreing docuemnts.On the other hand, multilinguality is the essential function to realize the digital library.The investigators have focused on the following aspects in this study ;(1) development of a set of software tools for retrieving and browsing multilingual cocuments, and(2) deelopment of software tools for users to use multilingual documents in accordance with their environment.The investigators have developed a multilingual browser technology named MHTML (multligual HTML) and an MHTML gateway server and an applet to display multilingual texts. They implemented the gateway server that transforms a source HTML document into an MHTML object which is displayd by the applet on a WWW borwser.The software is open for public and downloadable from the WWW site maintained by the investigators at the Univesity of Library and Information Science.The investigators have developed an electronic text collection of Japanese folk tales written in French, English and Japanese. The text is combined with the MHTML technology and they are viewable on any client only if it is Javaenabled. This collection is also open for public. Volunteers who writes tales and/or tranlates them into another language are joining this project not in Japan but also from the world.