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Community - Java Success Stories Imagine having to pore through piles of paper, data, and obscure texts in search of a small notation made in the corner of a document. This find the "needle in the haystack" process has been replaced with a convenient on-line process at the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. Two new Java applications, Inote and Babble, have enhanced computer-based research.

Institution: Institute for Advanced Technology, Univ. of Virginia
Location: Charlottesville, Virginia
Industry: Higher Education
URL: http://www.iath.virginia.edu

Noteworthy Inote
The Institute, which supports computer-based faculty research projects for Religion, History, Art, Literature, Foreign and Ancient Languages, and more, has built a Java-based application that allows for the annotation of images with text, audio, or other images using one or more overlays. The application, deployed from an RS/6000, is not an image editor; it enables the user to make a notation without altering the image. Inote can also automatically identify lines or columns of text for annotation and will soon allow users to connect SGML transcriptions and annoted images.

This application is helping researchers make great strides. The most noticeable benefit is the time saved by annotating an image instead of file footnoting. The "info" function of Inote, which reveals text information on image provenance and copyright, has made it easier to negotiate electronic publishing rights with some libraries and museums that hold objects for which researchers need digital images.

The Institute runs approximately fifty UNIX machines from Sun, SGI, DEC, and IBM( RS/6000s), plus Intel machines running Windows NT and Windows 95. This truly heterogeneous environment demands Java, a common development platform.

The Benefits of Babble
The Institute has also developed an SGML-capable synoptic text tool that can display multiple texts in parallel windows. This Java-based application called Babble is used in a number of the Institute’s projects that involve textual data in multiple non-Roman character sets. Generally used for projects in religion or history where ancient languages are employed in classic texts, Babble uses Unicode, an ISO 16-bit character set standard. Unicode allows multilingual texts, using mixed character sets, to be displayed simultaneously. Babble lets languages from long-ago, such as Greek, Hebrew, Cyrillic, and Aramaic, "speak" to the researchers.

No More Application Dependencies
Babble eliminates character set limitations within a single document on a Web server. (Typically documents are restricted to the Roman alphabet and one additional set.) Java was the only environment to support the system fonts that make it possible to deliver Unicode text involving multiple character sets to the researchers. This freedom allows researchers at the Institute to electronically distribute over the Internet text that would otherwise be impossible to represent.

Researchers at the Institute have greatly increased their productivity and removed a step from their work flow. No longer having to "snail mail" disks with files that are encoded in platform-specific, proprietary word-processing software has afforded the researchers the opportunity to capitalize on the speed of the Internet.

Business Profile
The University of Virginia located in Charlottesville, Virginia, offers forty-eight bachelor's degrees in forty-six fields, ninety-four master's degrees in sixty-four fields, six educational specialist degrees, two first-professional degrees (law and medicine), and fifty-five doctoral degrees in fifty-four fields.

The University's ten schools are:

  • School of Architecture
  • College of Arts and Science
  • Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
  • Colgate Darden Graduate School of Business Administration
  • McIntire School of Commerce
  • Curry School of Education
  • School of Engineering and Applied Science
  • School of Law
  • School of Medicine
  • School of Nursing



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