Multilingual Document Brwoser for Digital Lirbraries and its Application

WWW浏览器如Netscape Navigator和Internet Explorer在世界上得到了广泛的应用，这些浏览器被许多数字图书馆项目广泛接受作为用户界面，但是WWW和浏览器提供的多语种功能不足以满足数字图书馆的需要，因为它们一次只能显示用一个字符代码集编码的文本，而且因为客户端通常没有足够的字体显示foreing另一方面，多语种是实现数字图书馆的基本功能。（1）开发一套检索和浏览多语种同文的软件工具，以及（2）开发软件工具，使用户能够根据其环境使用多语言文档。研究人员开发了多语言浏览器技术名为MHTML（多语言HTML）和一个MHTML网关服务器和一个小程序来显示多语言文本。他们实现了一个网关服务器，它将源HTML文档转换成MHTML对象，并由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网站下载。研究人员开发了一个用法语、英语和日语撰写的日本民间故事电子文本集。文本与MHTML技术相结合，只有在启用Java的客户端上才能查看。该收藏也对公众开放。参与这个项目的志愿者不仅来自日本，也来自世界各地。

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.