Supporting Multilingual Paths on the WWW Unmil P. Karadkar, Luis Francisco-Revilla, Richard Furuta, Frank M. Shipman III, Avital Arora Texas A&M University

Walden’s Paths – Project Overview Facilitates inclusion of Web-based information in the K-12 curriculum Most information on the Web is not suitable for use in classroom education Information needs to be contextualized –To suit the curricular goals –To highlight focal points for students –To present issues of interest Paths are annotated lists of Web pages

Walden’s Paths – Project Overview WWW Host Web Page Internet Backbone A Path

Walden’s Paths Server List of Paths Path Summaries Links to author directories

Walden’s Paths Server Annotation Frame Control Frame Content Frame –not controlled by the Path Author –Following links –Caching of pages for performance

Walden’s Paths Server Off-Path traversal –Single click return to path Guided exploratory learning environment

Catering to a Global Audience Need to support Paths in different languages –Schools that teach more than one languages Need to support parallel versions of Paths –Widening the viewer-base –Paths as an aid in learning foreign languages Support for multiple fonts and parallel widgets Support for authoring multilingual Paths Users need not download any font faces Microsoft (Web Embedding Fonts Tool) BitStream (WebFont Wizard)

The Architecture Server Setup Reader Setup Author Setup Remote Web-site L1L1 P1P1 P2P2 PnPn L2L2 L2L2 L1L1 L3L3 L4L4 Published Paths Fonts Path Server HTTP Server Language Selector Control Widgets Save/Load Paths PathAuthor Local Paths Publish Paths Path Publisher Author Browser Reader

Interface (PathAuthor) Authoring in various languages and scripts –English –Spanish –Hindi Path and page information Master Paths

Interface (PathPublisher) CGI Application Authors upload Paths to a Web- accessible location Currently available in English only Separation of Paths by language

Interface (Path Server) Multilingual Interface Paths can be viewed by language

Interface – A page on the Path Page is available in the language of the Path

Interface – Another Page on the Path Page is not available in Spanish Page from the default language (English) is displayed

Issues Technology –Nascent Minimal support and buggy products –Server-specific Installed Web fonts must specify valid servers for access Each Walden’s Paths server must create fonts –Platform dependency (Windows) –Font availability The server must have access to the font used by the Web page Information –Most information is available in English –Use of Web-based translators yields unsatisfactory results

Future Work Support for collaborative authoring –Creating paths in multiple languages when an author doesn’t know all of them Internationalization of Walden’s Paths User modeling and Personalization User evaluation of the multilingual Paths –Path authoring –Browsing

Walden’s Paths – Project Overview Walden’s Paths as a part of larger Digital Library (NSDL) Support for virtual directories Path Manager –Web pages change frequently –Monitor and report web page changes