DELOS - A Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries
DELOS integrated European research in the field of digital libraries. This included research on library architectures, information access and personalisation, audio-visual and non traditional objects, user interfaces, knowledge extraction, semantic interoperability, preservation and evaluation.
- Project type: Network of Excellence
- Start date: 1 January 2004
- Duration: 48 months
- Funding: € 6 000 000
- Number of Partners: 57
- Project co-ordinator: GEIE ERCIM, France
- Contact: Philippe Rohou
Background
The DELOS vision has been that digital libraries would become "the universal knowledge repositories and communication conduits for the future, common vehicles by which everyone will access, analyse, evaluate, enhance, and exchange all forms of information. They will be accessible at any time and from anywhere, and will offer a friendly, multi-modal, efficient, and effective interaction and exploration environment".
Project goals and activities
The main effort of the DELOS Network of Excellence has been towards bridging the gap between this vision and the reality, by furthering research in many critical aspects of digital libraries and by the creation of an active European digital library research community.
The DELOS community, through over 500 scientific papers, has provided significant contributions to many key components of digital libraries, such as advanced and specialised digital library architectures; automatic metadata capturing and extraction from multimedia collections; mechanisms for the integration and automation of appraisal and ingestion of digital material; ontologies for both visual and textual concepts; personalised, context-aware multilingual and multimodal information retrieval, delivery and presentation; user-friendly interfaces; annotation services; testbeds for comparative systems and system component evaluation.
One of the joint activities of the DELOS network was to develop next generation digital library technologies, with the overall objective of building interoperable multimodal/multilingual services and integrated content management to be incorporated into industrial-strength digital library management systems. DelosDLMS, a globally integrated prototype and demonstrator for future digital libraries, offers various services and specialised functionalities on top of a reliable and scalable middleware infrastructure.
Another important research challenge has been the interoperability of the various content holders, i.e. the ability to store and retrieve information across collections in diverse media and languages. The DELOS contribution to this domain was the development of a digital library reference model, providing a conceptual framework for the definition of the relationships among the basic concepts underlying each digital library.
Results
The achievements of the DELOS Network can be classified into four categories:
- spreading excellence and disseminating research results to the interested application communities, and training young researchers in digital library related themes
- advancing the state of the art in a number of technologies which are crucial for the development of the next generation of digital libraries
- the definition of a reference model for digital libraries
- the development of DelosDLMS, a prototype for future digital library management systems.