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Calls & Context
Scholnet
A Digital Library Testbed to Support Networked Scholarly Communities
Abstract
The Scholnet project aims at building a digital library infrastructure for supporting communication and collaboration among networked scholarly communities. In addition to the provision of standard digital library capabilities for information acquisition, description, archiving, access, search, and dissemination, this infrastructure will provide support for non-textual data types, hypermedia annotation, cross-language search and retrieval, and personalised information dissemination.
From the technical point of view, Scholnet is being built by augmenting an existing federated digital library system, OpenDLib, with modules that implement non-standard digital library services.
The Scholnet infrastructure will be "open", i.e. it will allow an incremental service extensibility to meet the specific needs of the different scholarly communities.
Scholnet will be used to create a digital library infrastructure serving the Working Groups of the European Consortium for Informatics and Applied Mathematics.
Objectives
The aim of Scholnet is to build a new generation digital library infrastructure that can be used to easily create digital libraries that enable the immediate dissemination and accessibility of technical documentation (and the underlying ideas) within a globally distributed multilingual community. This infrastructure will contribute to the creation and diffusion of a new model for scholarly production.
The Scholnet infrastructure will provide not only the traditional digital library services but also support for non-textual documents, hypermedia annotation, cross-language search and retrieval, and personalised information dissemination.
The Scholnet infrastructure will be built as an open federation of interoperable services, possibly distributed and replicated on different servers. This architectural choice will allow an incremental service extensibility which will permit to satisfy the specific needs of the different scholarly communities.
A schematic representation of the Scholnet open architecture
Technical Approach
Scholnet is being built by extending the basic digital library services and the communication protocol provided by an existing DL system, called OpenDLib. Each Scholnet own service is implemented as a separate module which communicates with the others through a well defined HTTP-based protocol. The modules added are:
- Multimedia Storage and Delivery service
Supports the storage, the streaming (real-time) and the download delivery of the stored multimedia documents. Furthermore, it provides enhanced mechanisms for the dissemination of parts of the stored multimedia documents. - Hypermedia Annotation service Integrates annotation and reference linking features into the DL infrastructure. It stores annotations on documents and makes them available to authorised users. It is based on the Semantic Index System (http://www.ics.forth.gr/proj/isst/Systems/sis-tms.html).
- Multilingual Thesaurus service
Develops a multilingual thesauri and a terminology service able to support cataloguing and distributed access to heterogeneous electronic collections. It based on the SIS Thesaurus Management System (http://pc-erato2.iei.pi.cnr.it/eurogatherer).
The above services can be distributed and/or replicated on different servers. The number of servers, the allocation of the service instances to a server and the topology of the communication paths among services, can dynamically change either automatically, for example to recover from the crash of a server, or as a consequence of an explicit request formulated by the digital library administrator. This dynamic behaviour is controlled by the Meta service which maintains a constantly updated state of the architecture. This state is disseminated to all other services on demand.
The figure above shows a schematic representation of the Scholnet architecture.
Testbed
The Scholnet infrastructure has been designed for scholarly communities working in different domains. A number of Scholnet infrastructure testbeds will be created by instantiating the Scholnet system for different communities. Among these, the ERCIM Working groups (http://www.ercim.org) extended by the members of the DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries (http://www.ercim.org/delos) and the Clarity project language information community (http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/research/groups/nlp/clarity/).
Each testbed will be fed with the documents in use by the corresponding community. These documents consist of textual documentation, such as technical reports, project deliverables, workshop proceedings, and multimedia composite documents, such as synchronised videos and slides of seminars, tutorial, demos, etc.
Applications
The Scholnet digital library testbeds will enable the immediate dissemination and accessibility of technical documentation (and the underlying ideas) within their target scholarly communities. They will be actively used by the members of the communities in the every-day individual and/or collaborative tasks and will be regularly updated and extended. The instantiated infrastructures will contribute to the creation and diffusion of a new model for scholarly production.
Innovation
The innovation introduced by Scholnet is twofold. Presently, most of the DLs are implemented as ad-hoc services created to disseminate specific collections of documents. Scholnet, instead, proposes a generic DL system with a very adaptable archive functionality capable of working with a wide range of documents types, structures, media, etc. This system allows the creation of digital libraries by simply instantiating it and then loading its repositories with the appropriate content. The current DLs offer the same functionality of the traditional libraries on digital documents. Scholnet implements a system for a new generation of digital libraries which are not only mechanisms for the dissemination of content but also support the communication and collaboration among scholars.
- Project name:
- Scholnet
- Contract no:
- IST-1999-20664
- Project type:
- RTD
- Start date:
- 01/11/2001
- Duration:
- 30 months
- Total budget:
- €1,898,640
- Funding from the EC:
- €949,316
- Total effort in person-months:
- 230.3
- Website:
- http://www.ercim.org/scholnet/links.html
- Contact person:
- Dr. Bruno Le Dantec
- email: bruno.le_dantec@ercim.org
- tel: +33 4 92 38 50 13
- fax: + 33 4 92 38 50 11
- Project participants:
- CNR-IEI - IT
- ERCIM - FR
- FIMU - CZ
- FORTH - GR
- GMD - D
- INRIA - FR
- LORASI - FR
- SICS - S
- Keywords:
- Annotation
- Cross-language access
- Digital library infrastructure
- Digital library services
- Multimedia handling
- Personalised dissemination
- Scholarly communication
- Collaboration with other EC funded projects:
- CLARITY
- CLEF
- COLLATE
- CYCLADES
- DELOS NOE
- EUROGATHERER