JAGI - Journal of Australasian Graphics Imagery
A Report on Progress 






Andrew Marriott

School of Computing

Curtin University of Technology


Hayman Rd, Bentley. Western Australia.




Email: raytrace@cs.curtin.edu.au 


URL: http://www.cs.curtin.edu.au/~raytrace




Joanne Ng

SilkRoute Ventures Pte Ltd

287 Beach Road #02-00. Singapore 0719




Email: ngsej@cs.curtin.edu.au 


URL: http://www.cs.curtin.edu.au/~ngsej

Goals and Objectives   

It was proposed that a Web-based journal highlighting Australasian research in the fields of Computer Graphics and Computer Vision be set up.

The Executive Editor initially will be Andrew Marriott, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computing Science. The editorial and advisory boards will consist of Australasian and international researchers, recognised in their field. The journal will be concerned with (but not limited to) publishing fully refereed, multi-media articles on: 


  computer animation     architectural visualisation     scientific visualisation

  computer imagery       image generation algorithms     GIS/LIS

  CAD/CAM                multi-media communications      computer vision and pattern recognition

The journal will be freely available to any researcher or organisation on the Internet network and will enable the reader to receive text, PostScript documents, full colour, high resolution images, software, movies, audio and computer data. The transport mechanism will be the HTTP protocol with the journal being available from our World Wide Web (WWW) site at Curtin University and mirrored from various sites throughout the world. The subscriber will "read" the journal via a WWW viewer such as Mosaic (freely available from the Public Domain). (A sample journal edition is available via the following Universal Resource Locator (URL) 

  http://www.cs.curtin.edu.au/jagi
This extensive sample edition shows the potential for multi-media journals.)

It was also proposed that a high profile computer company such as Silicon Graphics Incorporated be approached to sponsor the electronic journal for a period of three years. The sponsorship may take different forms but will include a request for a technical researcher of international standing from within Silicon Graphics to be on the journal's Advisory Board.
Financial sponsorship will enable the journal to be launched and will contribute to the ongoing costs.
Editorial sponsorship will make available technical expertise necessary for a journal of this calibre.

It was also proposed that a Software Agent System be developed to help in the day to day running of the journal. This agent would ensure faster turn around for articles received, reviewed and published (Marriott and Ng. 1996; Marriott and Ng. 1996) .

More information about Software Agents may be found at http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~amw/agents/ and in answer to the question "What's an Agent?" see http://foner.www.media.mit.edu/people/foner/agents.html

See the special reference section for further information on agents.

Outcomes   

There were 4 main outcomes to come from this research:

(1) A high quality journal for Computer Graphics and Computer Vision which showcases Australasian research in these areas.
Although not specifically of substantial interest to the AVCC in the context of this research, it would have a major impact on Australasian research and publishing in the CG and CV areas. Of consequence, it may encourage other areas of Australasian research to publish in electronic form.

(2) An international presence of Australasian research.
The folding of the yearly Australasian Computer Graphics conference - Ausgraph - in 1991 removed one of the few venues for highlighting Australian [sic] Graphics research. This journal will address that problem with world-wide visibility of quality Australasian research. (It is hoped that the success of this journal may also help resurrect the Ausgraph conferences.) The journal will also help initiate and foster extensive collaboration with international researchers.

(3) An analysis of the success/failure of the journal which will detail problems (and hopefully their solutions) arising from the use of the Web as the transport medium.
This is of major concern to the future of electronic publishing - what problems will arise and can they be overcome.
Two years experience in extensively using the Web as a vehicle have already indicated, for example, what conventions and standards are appropriate for the proper evolution of the journal. For example, HTML, the markup language for Web-based documents, is an evolving standard with the latest specification being known as HTML-3. Few Web browsers are HTML-3 compliant as yet (as is to be expected) but some browsers (NetScape for example) seem intent on setting their own specifications for the evolution of HTML. This poses major problems for viewing documents on different platforms.
Similarly, the size of the multi-media components of a document will radically affect it's acceptance especially given the rate of growth of Internet traffic.
Experience in and analysis of these problem areas can help new journals get established faster and be accepted more readily.

(4) A set of guidelines for the setting up of similar journals in different disciplines.
This is of major importance to the AVCC since this encourages electronic publishing in other disciplines other than those traditionally associated with Information Technology.

There are many important areas which needed to be addressed for a quality electronic journal to be produced:

archiving of each edition of the journal so that it has a permanence for the future.
Also ensuring accessibility in the future - how should the journal be "given" to libraries?
mirroring of the journal at other sites in the world.
What problems does this impose on journal production?
What benefits are there in doing this?
Who is the editor of a journal if the source is available and it can be changed at a different site (Weeks, Cain, and Sanderson 1995; Jones and Schneier 1996)?
Who is liable in the case of a dispute?
The copyright of an article may rest with the author (or the journal - which is best?) but how do you control the problems of plagiarism if the source of an article is available world-wide (Erickson 1996; Erickson 1996)?
quality of articles
Peer review may be compromised by the large audience who can email back their disagreements as soon as they have finished reading the article. This may discourage authors, worry reviewers who have to be more aware of their subject area, cause problems for the editor. Although this leads to a better quality journal - the entire world is reviewing each article - it must be recognised that the protection of an author by the anonymity of paper disappears with an electronic journal.
Should peer review be in the form of online annotation (Röscheisen, Mogensen, and Winograd 1996; Röscheisen, Mogensen, and Winograd 1996)?
Can we measure the quality of an article without formal peer review?
Do we need to?(Some conferences publish every paper submitted regardless of quality as long as it is of importance to the area of research)
Can we overcome the Web trend of quantity before quality (Bieber and Isakowitz 1995; Lilley 1995).
layout issues
What format should be imposed on authors
What level of complexity of the document is appropriate? As mentioned previously, HTML is an evolving standard; what specification should be followed? (See http://www.uark.edu/~wrg .)
When does the journal evolve its preferred format for submission?
migration of authors from conventional journal requirements to those of an electronic journal.
The journal should provide access to tools which will help an author to change their style of writing to exploit the multi- media and hyperlinked nature of an electronic journal. For example, many Public Domain translators exist which will take a document in Latex or Word format say, and convert them into a moderately good HTML document.

Many of the above points will educate an author on the responsibility of publishing. It moves an author closer to being a publisher. In fact Shum, Sumner, and Laurillard 1996 maintain that the author(s) should move towards Web-wide peer refereeing. The author(s) must be more aware of the consequence of their research and the way in which they report it. For example, publishing software-based results without making the code available may be considered in the future as tantamount to academic fraud. Similarly, image processing artifacts in a image may be conveniently hidden by the lower quality printing process but will be very visible when a peer can examine the image directly on a workstation.

Format of the journal   

With the above objectives and outcomes in mind, it was very important to consider the format of the journal.

Most journals today present text and images. The text is linear in nature (except for a footnote or a citation - primitive forms of hyperlinks) and the images are usually of poor quality compared to what the author wants to show to the reader. The delivery of the journal is very resource intensive and is limited in distribution. The articles are often very out of date ( a turn around time of 18 months is common) and hence the articles are of historic use rather than showing what is happening now!

An electronic journal can show text in a non-linear fashion with links to other sources of information as well as present images at any desired quality ( the author can provide any level of quality limited only by the time and space available to the him or her self). But also, the author can provide an audio narrative, provide the software that is being detailed, the algorithms that are being explained, the data that is being used. This can foster research in a collaborative manner rather than contribute to the "re-invent the wheel" syndrome. The author can also provide PostScript hardcopy (or the original document in proprietary format) as well as movies of results if appropriate.

An excellent survey of the richness and potential of an electronic journal can be found via (Hancock, Carr, and Hall 1995).

The journal will publish only material of high quality in the correct format. The refereeing process will have the same rigour as any conventional journal. Original papers and seminars will receive at least three international referee reports. Technical notes will be assessed by two referees. Images will be judged on quality and innovation. Each article should be an original piece of work that has not been published before (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture, review, or thesis) and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Each article must be approved for publication by all co-authors, and where appropriate, by the responsible authorities at the institute where the work has been carried out.

Articles are considered under the following categories:


Original Papers
should be significant, original pieces of work, not exceeding 10000 words in length.
Technical Notes
should be similar to departmental reports, and contain more detail of implementation and methods than would normally appear in a paper. Contributions should not exceed 2000 words. It is assumed that any code described will be available either through anonymous ftp or through a link in the title page.
Seminar
will be multi-media articles using text, hyper-links, sound, images and movies. They will form part of an ongoing education process for the Graphics Community.
Images
will be original or innovative graphics of a technical or artistic nature. The number of images should not exceed 5 and should be of high quality ( full colour, high resolution). The images should be presented in a multi-media manner with appropriate textual information about each image as well as the producer of the image.
Software
will be articles concerned with software made available through hyperlinks or anonymous ftp. This software, available to the Graphics Community, will help reduce the "re-inventing of the wheel".
Email to Editor
will encourage the discussion of issues, particularly those arising from articles published in the journal. The editor will seek replies from the authors concerned and reserves the right to select and shorten email as appropriate.

The language of the journal is English. However, authors are encouraged to include a copy of all or parts of the paper in any language of their choice via hyperlinks in their title page.

Impact of the journal   

A journal of this calibre, providing these services, with world-wide circulation will have an enormous impact on Graphics and Vision research and will provide the vehicle for transporting this research well into the next century.

The feedback to the author can be overnight and serious discussion can be introduced into the current issue about the article! (Since the author can be contacted via email and the distribution of the journal is world-wide, the article is reviewed or refereed by the entire world rather than just by an Editorial Board!! Similarly, if the software is available, other researchers can test algorithms for validity. This raises the quality of the articles in the journal.)

In a similar manner, the contact point for an author is now no longer just an address nor even an email address. Most authors will have a WWW entry on their home machine which will let people get access to more information about that person - past publications, current projects, interests, etc. It is assumed that the list of past publications may also be hyperlink documents which will let an interested reader browse and obtain other information of relevance.

Because the journal will be available at your workstation, it will be a part of your work. It will not be necessary to go to a library or to have it circulated (and be weeks overdue) - it will be part of your information environment. This will lead to the journal being seen as an information source rather than as just late night catch-up reading! It will take its place alongside other information sources such as Archie, Veronica and, of course, a WWW browser such as Mosaic.

Mandatory Web Hype/Information   

In 1995, the Web although young (Berners-Lee et al 1994a) , is the largest server of information and the fastest growing (see(Pitkow and Recker 1994) ). Libraries which have not embraced the Network as another information source are losing customers (CACM 1995a). It is possible for a student or researcher to sit at a workstation and retrieve articles from all over the world. They may:

often retrieve articles no longer available

contact the author and discuss the research

get access to follow up papers which may be simple Internal documents.

follow hyperlinks to related documents or entire web sites which specialise in a particular area of research!

The content of the Web pages varies from academic home pages to research pages [turn off images] , to corporate pages [turn off images] , to very useful search engines such as WebCrawler , Lycos , SavvySearch and altavista , to the trivial and unfortunately, to the vast majority of other sites which are basically Web flotsam and jetsam often having neither form, nor content nor permanence.

As Ciolek (Ciolek 1996a) states

... Those with access (and copyright) to ample and high quality factual and/or scholarly materials are in the minority. Hence, sites will inevitably vie with each other for the status of being the Web's biggest (in terms of the catalogued hypertext links and the size of their logos), or most technically advanced (in terms of the speed and capacity of their search engines, interactivity, CGI scripts, and gateways to other software systems), or most colourful and dazzling (in terms of visual effects and virtual- reality technologies).

He sees the WWW as MMM - Multi-Media Mediocrity and this belief, coupled with Australia's remarkable ability to miss the boat at each new wave of opportunity, implies that only Quality in Web Publishing will put Australia on the map.

So where are we now.....   

The state of the journal is:


Hardware
A Webserver workstation is installed, 64 Megabytes main memory, 4 Gigabytes of disk.
Software
Apache HTTPD software running with the Harvest cache and indexing software. This will reduce latency of requests as well as provide an infinite cross-reference to articles in the journal.
Superstructure
The disk hierarchy and the logistical superstructure has been set up and tested to a limited extent. This will aid in minimising the labour intensiveness of the running of the journal.
Editorial Board
Several high profile local and international academics have accepted positions on the Editorial board. They are now actively canvassing for papers for the first edition.
Articles
The initial seminar of the journal is well underway, the images article is also being developed. The software section will have some useful Public Domain computer graphics software and data available for researchers.
Support Systems
Support software and systems are being developed to help an author migrate to the electronic forum. For example, an email and Web interface to an image conversion system is nearing completion. This will let a user mail in an image in some format and it can then be converted into a new format and emailed back to them.
Of more importance, the service can take a mathematical equation in EQN or Latex format and return an image of that typset equation.
Papers
Two papers detailing the development of the journal have been written for Web conferences . A Software Agent Based Electronic Journal for Computer Graphics and Computer Vision (Marriott and Ng. 1996) to be presented at the Asia-Pacific Web 96 conference in Hong Kong and Beijing, and An Electronic Journal for Computer Graphics and Computer Vision (Marriott and Ng. 1996) to be presented at AusWeb 96 on the Gold Coast.
Joanne Ng and I will also co-chair a colloquium on Electronic Publishing at the Asia-Pacific Web 96.
Joanne Ng and I have a paper in the first IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications Special Edition on Education which talks about the initial Web work that we did. This edition will be their first online edition and will have links to our home pages (which will have prominent links to the journal).

Problems   

The problems faced by the journal seem to be social rather than technological:

(1) How seriously are electronic publications regarded by universities for tenure and promotions purpose?
This seems to be a big concern for academics who wish to become involved with the journal and for those who wish to submit to the journal. The journal appeals to the young academics but they are under the ultimate thumb of the "old" academics who control the research money and the tenurable positions.
Of course, this will not be a problem for an electronic journal commissioned by the AVCC :?)

(2) How will electronic journal editors ensure academic credibility?
The low signal-to-noise ratio of information on the Web is disasterous for any Web-based publication. Simply finding anything which has information is difficult. The obvious drawcard for a journal is respected names for those who submit and those who edit. But currently, brave are those who submit or edit on the Web. Bootstrapping this process is difficult and hampered by 1 above.

(3) How does a would-be electronic journal publisher get help from their School/University?
The proposal for this journal originated in early 1994. It sat on a university IT committee desk for one year and only surfaced when the Web became "hot" (too late then).
The departmental head has given little support (financial or time release) to the project although conferences organised by the School get plenty of support. The Web is seen as "mickey-mouse" in nature and "not a real academic venue". This is a major problem as there would appear to be no kudos or "brownie points" to be gained in either submitting to or supporting an electronic journal. It will be interesting to see what Research Infrastructure points will be acknowledged for editing the journal, and for papers published in the journal.

(4) Who pays for "no-charge" publishers?
The universities are wondering what to do with this new information revolution. For example, a Web-based Computer Graphics course is being used at over 12000 sites worldwide but the author of the course cannot give a firm answer to academics requesting that the course be mirrored at their site because the university has no set policy on whether the Web pages are an educational course which belongs to it or whether they are simply an electronic text book which the author may publish!!

Conclusions   

These and other problems are shared by academic electronic publishers worldwide. The colloquium co-chaired by Joanne Ng and myself at the Asia-Pacific Web 96 conference will discuss these problems with the attendees and try to arrive at some solutions which may make it easier for subsequent electronic journals.

The social problems enumerated above may delay the spread and growth of electronic journals and will cause hardship and heartbreak for those driving them but I believe that the future of (academic) information dissemination is Web-based.

Background of Researchers   

References