Site: Hitachi, Ltd.
Central Research Laboratory (CRL)
1-280 Higashi-koigakubo, Kokubunji-shi,
Tokyo, 185-8601, Japan
http://koigakubo.hitachi.co.jp
maeza@crl.hitachi.co.jp

Date Visited: 25 March 1998

WTEC Attendess: R.D. Shelton (report author), T. Ager, B. Croft, L. Goldberg, M. Shamos

Hosts:

• Shinichi Fukushima, Chief Manager, National Project Promotion, ISG
• Akio Azuma, Engineer, Information Systems Department, ISG
• Junji Nakata, Researcher, Systems Development Lab
• Hiroyuki Maezawa, Department Manager, MSR Department
• Hiromichi Fujisawa, Chief Researcher, MSR
• Yoshie Ohno, Sr. Researcher, MSR
• Yasushi Kanada, Sr. Researcher, MSR
• Minoru Ashizawa, Sr. Researcher, MSR
• Junichi Matsuda, Sr. Researcher, MSR
• Toshiko Aizono, Researcher, MSR
• Yuko Nakamura, Research Cooperation Center, CRL

BACKGROUND

Hitachi is a $68 billion (net sales) company with 330,000 employees that invested over $4.07 billion (6% of sales) in electrical and electronics R&D in FY 1996 (Hitachi 1997a).

• The Central Research Lab, one of Hitachi's seven corporate laboratories, provides the Hitachi Group (Hitachi Ltd. and affiliated companies) with R&D in information and media, electronic devices, and medical electronics with 820 technical personnel on its lovely 50-acre campus in western Tokyo, in the city of Kokubunji (Hitachi 1997b).
• The WTEC team visited the Multimedia Systems Research (MSR) Department, one of 11 research departments at CRL. The company also brought in researchers doing related work from other units in the Tokyo area: a business group, the Information Systems Group (ISG) and the Systems Development Lab., which is another corporate laboratory of Hitachi, Ltd.

MITI DL PROJECT

Mr. Fukushima provided a briefing on the Next-Generation Digital Library System Research and Development Project (NGDL), funded and initiated by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI). Hitachi has contributed to the design of the architecture for the system, as well as provided some of the background research. Five Hitachi units are participating in the project. Fujitsu will integrate the prototype system of the project. Seven other companies are involved. The background research and design was completed during FY 1996-97 and development and testing will be conducted during FY 1998-99.

The overall architecture selected contains three layers: Presentation, Function, and Data based on a distributed object-oriented model. The messaging architecture features synchronous and asynchronous communication and a WWW-CORBA connection protocol. The basic agent architecture is based on FIPA agent management, agent communications via FIPA and KQML, and migration via OMG. The multimedia database architecture is based on SQL3, SQL/MM, and OODB with SMGL document management. The mobile agent architecture is based on CORBA, OMG/MAF and the Java programming language, and is being developed by Nihon Unisys. The intelligent information retrieval agent, which can search a variety of databases on the Internet, is mainly being developed by NEC.

The Japanese Information Processing Development Center (JIPDEC) has a set of slides on this project at http://www.jipdec.or.jp. This site contains a list of several other enabling technology development efforts now underway.

Hitachi developed the predecessor PILOT digital library system now in operation at the Center for Information Infrastructure (CII) in Fujisawa City (http://www/cii.ipa.jp/el/index_c.html).

DEMONSTRATIONS

Concept-Based Text Retrieval (T. Aizono)

This was the one NGDL-funded project shown; the others were apparently internally funded. This Japanese-language system is intended to assist the user retrieve text information via a thesaurus and document clustering. The thesaurus is automatically extracted from the database by term extraction and compound term analysis leading to co-occurrence data acquisition: syntactic co-occurrence, co-occurrence in the same window, and co-occurrence in the same sentence. The first and second order correlations are determined and stored for browsing. Document clustering is based on clustering query-related terms, which are used to assign documents to clusters via the group average method. Performance data included 86% precision of the compound term for the thesaurus, and real time clustering of 2,500 documents in 15 seconds.

Multilingual Translation System (J. Matsuda)

Hitachi has a mature commercial English/Japanese machine translation (MT) product being sold as an application program for some ¥9,800 in the Akihabara electronics shopping area of Tokyo. This demonstration showed some improvements of this product for English language Web page browsing by Japanese speakers plus some of Hitachi's new interests (also seen at several other sites) in Japanese/Chinese and Japanese/Korean MT systems. It was difficult for the panel to evaluate the accuracy of the translations without an interpreter, but the user interface was clearly well done.

Encyclopedia Retrieval System (Y. Kanada)

This is a text retrieval system based on combining a keyword search with a second one such as some unit of measurement mentioned in the records. Mr. Kanada demonstrated several searches, including one that combined the Japanese word for "riot," or civil disturbance, with the date of occurrence in the encyclopedia. A second search combined the names of rivers with the area of their watershed.

Webshelf3/4Virtual Personal Library (M. Ashizawa)

At the IBM Tokyo Research Lab, the WTEC panel saw a demo of Global Digital Museum, which allowed the user to assemble a personal collection of museum-quality artifacts, at least virtually. A sudden desire to be able to assemble a personal library of rare books was satisfied the next day at Hitachi Central Research Laboratory by Webshelf, an attractive human-network interaction (HNI) system, which allows users to personalize information on the Web. The display showed an image of a conventional bookshelf containing books, the title on each spine being linked to a URL. Two types of bookshelves exist: a communal bookshelf located on the server allowing for "books" (URLs) to be shared, and a private bookshelf located on the client. By clicking the spine of a book, the document is recalled from the Web in the page-style of a physical book and is read by turning the pages using page-turning graphics. Electronic marginalia could be appended. Webarchive, a hypermedia archive proxy server, stores all versions of data and links browsed by the user separately, allowing the user to browse past versions of Web pages, as well as saving the version as a particular edition of a book.

CONCLUSIONS

A half-day's visit to a company the size of Hitachi can only sample the relevant R&D projects. For information on some other projects, a copy of Hitachi Technology 97 (Hitachi 1997c) was provided. A reprint (Kamiuchi et al. 1997) described the digital image system (DIS), which is the basis of Hitachi's respected virtual museum "Viewseum" hosted at http://www.viewseum.com.

Also, the company's homepage at http://www.hitachi.co.jp links to sites of the Hitachi's other corporate labs, which contain short summaries of many interesting projects. A recently announced prototype system at CRL was a display system for the visually impaired of Windows® 95 screens using a 3D acoustic field. A part of this work was performed as part of the National Research & Development Programs for Medical and Welfare Apparatus under entrustment by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO).

The Hitachi Systems Development Lab (SDL) Web site lists an impressive digital information access program including, for example, a video-based virtual reality system, data mining for digital libraries, and at least five projects on network security.

The breadth of all these efforts is impressive, and those demonstrated in detail show great promise as building blocks for large information delivery systems such as digital libraries.

REFERENCES

Hitachi. 1997a. Hitachi, Ltd. (Kabushiki Kaisha Hitachi Seisakusho), Annual Report FY 1996. 6, Kanda-Surugadai 4-chome, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 101, Japan.

Hitachi. 1997b. Central Research Laboratory, Hitachi, Ltd. (Brochure). February 21.

Hitachi. 1997c. Hitachi Technology '97. Hitachi Review Special Issue. June.

Kamiuchi, T., N. Hamada, and N. Ikeshoji. 1997. Digital image system and its applications. Hitachi Review. Vol. 46. No. 5.