8th International Workshop of the DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries on Future Digital Library Management Systems
(System Architecture & Information Access)

Venue: Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany
Date: March 29th - April 1st, 2005

Final Proceedings
Participants list

This workshop, the 8th in the DELOS series of Thematic Workshops, was devoted to two critical themes: system architecture and information access. The objective of the workshop was to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in these two areas and their inter-connections, to identify fundamental system services that allow the development and operation of future Digital Libraries, and to explore the main relevant technical directions.

With respect to system architecture, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Data Management, Grid Middleware (Grid), and Service-oriented Architecture (SoA) are the topics of primary interest. P2P architectures allow for loosely-coupled integration of information services and sharing of information. Different aspects of P2P systems (e.g., indexes and application platforms) must be combined to achieve the desired functionality. On the other hand, Grid computing middleware is needed because certain services within Digital Libraries are complex and computationally intensive (e.g., for extraction of features in multimedia documents to support content-based similarity search or for information mining in bio-medical data). Finally, SoA provides mechanisms to describe the semantics and usage of information services. In addition, in an SoA, we have mechanisms to combine services into workflow processes for sophisticated search and maintenance of dependencies.

With respect to information access, a fundamental challenge arises from the great variety of content that future Digital Libraries are called to manage, each one with its own characteristics and particularities, with respect to both format and meaning. Organization of information within an individual source and efficient and effective search are key issues that need to be addressed. An additional challenge arises from the user interfaces planned for future systems, where the general trend is towards richer languages and diverse interaction styles both at the syntactic and at the semantic level. New interaction management, optimization, execution, and result consolidation algorithms need to be devised to support the emerging functionalities.

Clearly, the two themes are closely interrelated and some of the most exciting problems arise at the intersection of the two. The goal of this workshop has been to provide a forum for discussing the latest advances and on-going efforts in these and related areas as the field moves towards future DLMSs.