Multilingual Document Brwoser for Digital Lirbraries and its Application

WWW浏览器如Netscape Navigator和Internet Explorer在世界上被广泛使用。这些浏览器被许多数字图书馆项目广泛接受为用户界面。然而，万维网和浏览器上提供的多语言功能对数字图书馆来说是不够的，因为它们一次只能显示用一个字符代码集编码的文本，而且客户端通常没有足够的字体来显示文档。另一方面，多语种是实现数字图书馆的基本功能。研究者在本研究中主要关注以下几个方面：(1)开发一套检索和浏览多语言文档的软件工具；(2)开发用户根据其环境使用多语言文档的软件工具。研究人员开发了一种名为MHTML（多语言HTML）的多语言浏览器技术、一个MHTML网关服务器和一个显示多语言文本的小程序。他们实现了将源HTML文档转换为MHTML对象的网关服务器，该对象由applet在WWW浏览器上显示。该软件对公众开放，并可从图书馆与信息科学大学研究人员维护的WWW网站下载。调查人员开发了一个用法语、英语和日语编写的日本民间故事电子文本集。文本与html技术结合在一起，只有在启用java的情况下，它们才能在任何客户机上查看。这个收藏也对公众开放。写故事和/或把故事翻译成另一种语言的志愿者加入了这个项目，不仅在日本，而且来自世界各地。

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.