The DELOS Association for Digital Libraries has been established in order to keep the "DELOS spirit" alive by promoting research activities in the field of digital libraries. More info...
2007-06-08: Second Workshop on Foundations of Digital Libraries
The 2nd International Workshop on Foundations of Digital Libraries will be held in Budapest (Hungary) on 20 Septemeber 2007, in conjunction with the 11th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technologies for Digital Libraries (ECDL 2007). Event website
DL Events
January 24-25, 2008 - Padova, Italy
4th Italian Research Conference on Digital Library Systems Event website
December 5-7, 2007 - Pisa, Italy
Second DELOS Conference on Digital Libraries Event website
After four years of activities, DELOS, the Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries, funded by the European Union under the Sixth Framework Program, has reached the end of the funding period. Actually, the activities of DELOS, in a broad meaning, started many years ago, with the “DELOS Working Group” at the end of the nineties, and the DELOS Thematic Network, under the Fifth Framework Program, from 2001 to 2003. Since the beginning, the main objective of DELOS has always been that of advancing the state of the art in the field of Digital Libraries, by coordinating the efforts of the major European research teams carrying on activities in the technology fields of interest to Digital Libraries.
The DELOS vision is that Digital Libraries will become the universal knowledge repositories and communication conduits for the future, common vehicles by which everyone will access, analyze, 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. In reality, while it is true that the present functionality of Digital Libraries has improved the quality of the results of users’ activities, nevertheless, the current state of affairs is still far from the vision, as almost all Digital Libraries developed so far have been designed and implemented having in mind specific applications, and lack the capability of supporting different information domains or to accommodate new emerging user needs. The main effort of DELOS has always been in trying to bridge the gap between the vision and the reality, by furthering research in many critical aspects of Digital Libraries.
Digital Libraries represent the meeting point of a large number of technical areas within the field of informatics, i.e., data management, information retrieval, document management, information systems, the web, image processing, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, mass-storage systems, and others. Moreover, Digital Libraries draw upon several other disciplines and fields beyond informatics, such as library sciences, museum sciences, archives, sociology, psychology, etc. In addition to providing substantial contribution to research in many of those fields, DELOS has also been successful in establishing a large European research community on this multi-faceted research field, and it is hoped that this community will continue in the future most of the main activities of DELOS, regardless of possible funding from the European Union.
[Click here for the First DELOS Conference on Digital Libraries]
Program
Second DELOS Conference on Digital Libraries 5-7 December 2007
This Conference intends to demonstrate the major results achieved by the members of the DELOS Community in the Digital Library field. The DELOS research activities are organized around the main themes that have been identified as fundamental for advancing the reality one further step towards the vision. They are summarized in the table below.
DELOS Research Areas
Foundational research
Reference Model for Digital Library Systems
Systems-related research
Digital Library System Architectures
Information Access to Digital Libraries
Audio/Visual Digital Libraries
Semantic Interoperability in Digital Libraries
User-related research
User Interfaces for Digital Libraries
Digital Library Visualization
Personalization in Digital Libraries
Horizontal issues
Digital Library Curation and Preservation
Digital Repositories
Digital Library Evaluation Methodologies
Digital Library Evaluation Infrastructures
The Conference will last two and half days. The first two days will be dedicated to presentations by members of the DELOS Community of their latest research results and their main contributions in those research areas where they have focussed their activities in the last few years. The last half-day will be dedicated to presentations and demonstrations of tools and services implemented as prototypes of varying degree of completeness. Actually, one of the main efforts where DELOS has been focussing in the last period is the implementation of a Digital Library Management System embodying most of the results produced by DELOS Community members.
During the Conference, a special emphasis will be placed on the Digital Library Reference Model defined by DELOS, and the results of the first stage of the project will be presented during the first plenary session. In the second day of the Conference there will be a special session dedicated to the Reference Model. This session will be a good opportunity to bring together the international Digital Library community, especially researchers interested in Digital Library modeling and working on the foundations of the field, for intensive brainstorming and exchange of ideas. The series of workshops also intends to serve as a vehicle for expanding the group of researchers involved in the defintion of the Reference Model, starting from those actually participating in the workshops, and continuing on afterwards through appropriate collaborative instruments initiated by DELOS.
On December 4th it is planned to have a Special Session on Multilingual/Multimedia Access to Cultural Heritage, where the latest results of MultiMatch will be presented. MultiMatch is a spin-off project of DELOS and CLEF, which aims at providing personalized information access to digital objects in the Cultural Heritage Domain. The project addresses issues of interoperability at three levels: language, content, and media. The solutions adopted will be discussed and the prototype search engine will be demonstrated.
The whole Conference is intended to provide also a forum for discussion and exchange of ideas. Anyone interested in organizing “special sessions” on specific topics, before or after the Conference, is invited to get in touch with the Conference Secretariat (see below) with their proposals. It is planned to organize a special session with some of the projects with which DELOS is cooperating (e.g. DILIGENT, DRIVER, MICHAEL, TEL, etc) to discuss ways and possibilities of continuing the cooperation at the end of the funding period.
Please refer to the Program webpage for complete and updated information about the program.
Registration
Attendance to the conference is free, but advance registration is required. Please register here.
Venue and Hotel Reservation
The conference will be held at the Grand Hotel Continental, located in Tirrenia, a beach resort about 12 km from Pisa. For logistic information and a hotel reservation form please see the relevant webpage here.
Scientific Committee
Costantino Thanos (chair) Vittore Casarosa Tiziana Catarci Stavros Christodoulakis Alberto Del Bimbo Norbert Fuhr Yannis Ioannidis Liz Lyon Philippe Rohou Seamus Ross Hans Schek
For further information please contact the Conference Secretariat: