Grid Technologies for Digital Libraries  

Mike Mineter, National e-Science Centre, Edinburgh

There is growing recognition that digital libraries and grid computing are poised to open new horizons for learning and for research. During a joint DELOS/DILIGENT/EGEE event in Athens last April, attended by 29 people from 9 countries, Yannis Ioannidis recognized that digital libraries need "systems that are people-centric, collaborative, distributive, generic, and appropriate for a wide variety of applications". These are the goals that drive the development of Grid computing, and so the DILIGENT Project is building upon the middleware and infrastructure provided by the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) Project. In Athens, Heiko Schuldt explored the relevance of Peer-to-Peer and service-oriented approaches, as well as grids, and emphasized that these are by no means orthogonal. The EGEE training team then introduced grid computing and the EGEE Project.

Building on the achievements of many initiatives in grid computing over several years, EGEE is providing a production-quality infrastructure of operational support and middleware services - the production quality being in contrast to the best-efforts prototypes of grids to date. Grid infrastructure supports multiple research communities by dynamically, flexibly, and securely creating for each community a "virtual computing environment."

Requirements for collaboration, for managing intense computational demands with high volumes of data, and federation of multiple large data resources are met by middleware services. Services specific to an application community are built upon generic middleware that gives authentication, authorization and single-sign-on to geographically widespread resources of data and computers. These resources are provided by many institutions, in general operating under distinct administrative domains.

A grid does not impose any centralized control - resources remain controlled by their owning institutes - users rights being assigned by policies agreed between site managers, grid operators and the research communities.

EGEE inherited and re-engineered middleware that emerged from earlier European and US projects, in particular from high-energy physicists engaged in building new experiments at CERN. EGEE is now supporting a wide range of science projects - including bioinformatics, chemistry, astrophysics, earth science and earth observation. Yet although sciences have been the early adopters of the technology - often sciences with new generations of instruments - grid computing is expanding its horizons further. It is beginning to serve those engaged in social sciences, arts and humanities, and so the term "e-Science" is making way for "e-Research". Grid computing is further broadening its horizons by enabling the federation of 'legacy' databases, going beyond its initial emphasis on managing data created by new research.

As readers of this newsletter well know , research is one element in a cycle of activity from the generation of new knowledge, through its curation, to its re-use in future research and education.

In each of these elements resources are held in many institutions, computational demands can be intense, and data volumes large: there is a need for grid computing to support a new generation of "virtual digital libraries", as DILIGENT will demonstrate.

The partnerships with the digital library community will help the horizons of grid computing to expand, to include the dynamic provision and configuration of many services broadly needed across research and education.

Further information:

• Grid Technologies for Digital Libraries
  http://agenda.cern.ch/fullAgenda.php?ida=a051871
• The Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) Project
  http://public.eu-egee.org/
• The DILIGENT Project
  http://www.diligentproject.org/
• National e-Science Centre website
  http://www.diligentproject.org/

<previous