Introduction

The DELOS Project commenced January 2004 and so at this early stage in proceedings we intend to make use of our first Newsletter report to highlight briefly the main objectives of the workpackage and to report on the activities fixed in the kick-off meeting of this workpackage.

Objectives of our Workpackage

Citizens of the future should be able, through the medium of better designed digital libraries to gain access to a myriad of forms of knowledge from anywhere and at any time and in an efficient and user-friendly fashion. But for this to happen those digital libraries will need to arrive at a common infrastructure which is highly scalable, customizable and adaptive. Ideally, such an infrastructure would combine concepts and techniques from peer-to-peer data management, grid computing middleware, and service-oriented architectures.

Peer-to-peer architectures allow for loosely coupled integration of information services and sharing of information such as recommendations and annotations. Different aspects of peer-to-peer systems (e.g. indexes, and P2P application platforms) will need to be combined. Grid computing middleware is needed because certain services within digital libraries are complex and computationally intensive, (for example the extraction of features in multimedia documents to support content-based similarity search or for information mining in bio-medical data). The service-oriented architecture provides mechanisms to describe the semantics and usage of information services. Moreover, it supports mechanisms to combine services into workflow processes for sophisticated search and maintenance of dependencies.

The main objective of this workpackage therefore is the conceptual and experimental evaluation of the impact of these three main directions on a digital library architecture. A thorough evaluation of existing approaches will reveal the advantages and disadvantages of either approach. Moreover in order to be able to quantify that thorough evaluation satisfactorily, we will have to develop a robust set of benchmarks.

Digital Library Architecture Cluster Activity

A joint kick-off meeting was held in Zurich over 5-6 February 2004 with colleagues working in Information Access and Personalization which meant some 24 staff in all. We felt that it was very important to take the opportunity to bring together members of both workpackages and discuss the first steps of the various tasks. After general guidelines on procedures and an overview of the project as a whole and our workpackages in particular, each colleague spoke on the work of their group and how they intended to contribute to the work of their cluster This was the principal aim of the kick-off meeting and we felt we had largely achieved it.

We then proceeded to put some flesh on the bones of a number of activities that had been outlined in the project proposal. The three main task areas within the DLA Cluster emerged refined and scheduled as follows:

• Architectures for digital libraries - UMIT
• Standards and protocols - UKOLN
• Mobile information and information dynamics - ETHZ

Outlined briefly below, the following activities are planned for the first 18 months of the workpackage:

• Organisation of workshops on digital library architectures
• Development of surveys that collect most significant contributions of peer-to-peer data management, grid computing, and service orientation for digital library architectures
• Execution of a comparison and feasibility study on the adoption of a set of common standards and protocols
• Evaluation of approaches to connection management and information synchronisation
• Development of a benchmark for the evaluation of digital library architectures
• Execution of experiments to find out the strengths and weaknesses of different architectures

With respect to the first item, it was agreed to hold the first workshop on digital library architectures over 23-24 June 2004. This workshop will take place at Cagliari (Italy) in conjunction with the Italian symposium on advanced database systems. Maristella Agosti has taken on the general and local organization of the workshop. Hans-Jürg Schek and Can Türker are co-chairing the programme committee. Meanwhile, a call for papers has been distributed through the various email channels.

This first workshop will be devoted to the architectural infrastructure of future digital libraries. The primary objectives of the workshop are to bring together European researchers interested in the architecture and related basic services that make it possible to build and operate digital libraries, and secondly, to identify the directions in which further research should go. This workshop will provide a forum for discussing the development and integration of building blocks and services for digital library infrastructures particularly in the following areas:

• Peer-to-Peer Data Management
• Grid Computing Middleware
• Service-oriented Architecture

More details about this workshop are available at http://www.dbs.ethz.ch/delos which will also hold the presentations of this workshop on its completion.

A second workshop, again a joint one between DLA and IAP, has already been fixed for 29 March - 1 April 2005 in Dagstuhl, Germany. This workshop will be organized by Gerhard Weikum, MPI Saarbrücken.

Author Details

Can Türker
Member
ETH Zurich,
Institute of Information Systems,
CH-8092 Zurich
E-mail:
Telephone: +41 1 6327248
Fax: +41 1 6321172
URL: http://www.dbs.ethz.ch