John Mark Ockerbloom's Thesis Page
This page contains material related to my thesis, Mediating
Among Diverse Data Formats. To find out more about what
I've been doing with my thesis technology since I left CMU,
see this page.
Thesis Defense
I defended my thesis successfully on January 20, 1998.
Here are the slides from the defense,
in Powerpoint format, and
in HTML and GIF format.
(The HTML/GIF version was converted from Powerpoint using TOM, the system
I built for my thesis,
and then hand-tweaked a bit.)
Thesis Document
The final version of the thesis document was turned in on May 1,
and is now available.
You can now
view the abstract and the
postscript version of the full document (about 3.5 MB).
If you'd rather not read 150+ pages, but want something more than
the abstract, maybe you'd like to read the
summary.
Other Papers and Presentations
- I gave a talk at the University of Pennsylvania in February 1999
on TOM and digital libraries, called Building the Digital Library
Community. Here are the
slides I used, in Powerpoint 97 format.
- If you want more technical detail on how TOM addresses emulation
and migration to aid in digital library preservation, see
these slides, from a talk I gave at CNI in
April 1999.
- Respectful
Type Converters (May 1998) is a followup paper with Jeannette Wing
elaborating on the intersubstitutability concept introduced in the
thesis. A slightly updated version
will appear in Transactions on Software Engineering.
- I gave a talk at the CAETI workshop in March 1996 about using TOM
for networked conversion. Here are the
slides
I used, in Powerpoint 4.0 format. (It includes a number of duplicates
- Technical report: Exploiting Structured Data in Wide-Area Information Systems (1995),
in PostScript
- Thesis proposal
Demonstrations
More about the details of TOM
Most of the material below is somewhat out-of-date. Fully
up-to-date descriptions of the system are in my thesis.
Some of the material may be restricted access at the moment; send me
mail if you'd like to see some of the restricted stuff.
spok@cs.cmu.edu (John Ockerbloom)