Access Interfaces for Open Archival Information Systems based on the OAI-PMH and the OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services

In recent years, a variety of digital repository and archival systems have been developed and adopted. All of these systems aim at hosting a variety of compound digital assets and at providing tools for storing, managing and accessing those assets. This paper will focus on the definition of common and standardized access interfaces that could be deployed across such diverse digital respository and archival systems. The proposed interfaces are based on the two formal specifications that have recently emerged from the Digital Library community: The Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) and the NISO OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services (OpenURL Standard). As will be described, the former allows for the retrieval of batches of XML-based representations of digital assets, while the latter facilitates the retrieval of disseminations of a specific digital asset or of one or more of its constituents. The core properties of the proposed interfaces are explained in terms of the Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS).Comment: Accepted paper for PV 2005 "Ensuring Long-term Preservation and Adding Value to Scientific and Technical data" (http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/pv-2005/

Theory and Practice of Data Citation

Citations are the cornerstone of knowledge propagation and the primary means of assessing the quality of research, as well as directing investments in science. Science is increasingly becoming "data-intensive", where large volumes of data are collected and analyzed to discover complex patterns through simulations and experiments, and most scientific reference works have been replaced by online curated datasets. Yet, given a dataset, there is no quantitative, consistent and established way of knowing how it has been used over time, who contributed to its curation, what results have been yielded or what value it has. The development of a theory and practice of data citation is fundamental for considering data as first-class research objects with the same relevance and centrality of traditional scientific products. Many works in recent years have discussed data citation from different viewpoints: illustrating why data citation is needed, defining the principles and outlining recommendations for data citation systems, and providing computational methods for addressing specific issues of data citation. The current panorama is many-faceted and an overall view that brings together diverse aspects of this topic is still missing. Therefore, this paper aims to describe the lay of the land for data citation, both from the theoretical (the why and what) and the practical (the how) angle.Comment: 24 pages, 2 tables, pre-print accepted in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), 201

Submission of content to a digital object repository using a configurable workflow system

The prototype of a workflow system for the submission of content to a digital object repository is here presented. It is based entirely on open-source standard components and features a service-oriented architecture. The front-end consists of Java Business Process Management (jBPM), Java Server Faces (JSF), and Java Server Pages (JSP). A Fedora Repository and a mySQL data base management system serve as a back-end. The communication between front-end and back-end uses a SOAP minimal binding stub. We describe the design principles and the construction of the prototype and discuss the possibilities and limitations of work ow creation by administrators. The code of the prototype is open-source and can be retrieved in the project escipub at http://sourceforge.ne

Requirements for Provenance on the Web

From where did this tweet originate? Was this quote from the New York Times modified? Daily, we rely on data from the Web but often it is difficult or impossible to determine where it came from or how it was produced. This lack of provenance is particularly evident when people and systems deal with Web information or with any environment where information comes from sources of varying quality. Provenance is not captured pervasively in information systems. There are major technical, social, and economic impediments that stand in the way of using provenance effectively. This paper synthesizes requirements for provenance on the Web for a number of dimensions focusing on three key aspects of provenance: the content of provenance, the management of provenance records, and the uses of provenance information. To illustrate these requirements, we use three synthesized scenarios that encompass provenance problems faced by Web users toda

Rule-based information integration

In this report, we show the process of information integration. We specifically discuss the language used for integration. We show that integration consists of two phases, the schema mapping phase and the data integration phase. We formally define transformation rules, conversion, evolution and versioning. We further discuss the integration process from a data point of view

Versioning of Digital Objects in a Fedora-based Repository

This presentation gives an overview on the complex versioning re-quirements for digital objects in the scope of the project eSciDoc and discusses our solution based on the flexible repository architecture Fedora. It describes the conceptual background of how the eSciDoc infrastructure handles versioning of digital objects. Versioning and object identification are strongly interwoven concepts. Therefore, the unique identification of objects and their versions are discussed as well

Reflections on the future of research curation and research reproducibility

In the years since the launch of the World Wide Web in 1993, there have been profoundly transformative changes to the entire concept of publishing—exceeding all the previous combined technical advances of the centuries following the introduction of movable type in medieval Asia around the year 10001 and the subsequent large-scale commercialization of printing several centuries later by J. Gutenberg (circa 1440). Periodicals in print—from daily newspapers to scholarly journals—are now quickly disappearing, never to return, and while no publishing sector has been unaffected, many scholarly journals are almost unrecognizable in comparison with their counterparts of two decades ago. To say that digital delivery of the written word is fundamentally different is a huge understatement. Online publishing permits inclusion of multimedia and interactive content that add new dimensions to what had been available in print-only renderings. As of this writing, the IEEE portfolio of journal titles comprises 59 online only2 (31%) and 132 that are published in both print and online. The migration from print to online is more stark than these numbers indicate because of the 132 periodicals that are both print and online, the print runs are now quite small and continue to decline. In short, most readers prefer to have their subscriptions fulfilled by digital renderings only