Virtual digital libraries

Digital libraries represent the meeting places for knowledge providers and knowledge consumers supporting and enhancing the process through which knowledge is created, used, and discovered. The demand for digital libraries is worldwide strong. These complex systems can offer a richer set of functionality than that initially expected and are able to transform the way in which joint research is conducted, thus responding to the requirements of a great number of research communities. In fact, nowadays research is a collaborative and multidisciplinary effort conducted by virtual research organisations whose components are spread worldwide. Despite this large and innovative demand the current digital library development models remain unchanged and so they are not able to match the emerging requirements. In this dissertation we propose a novel approach based on virtual digital libraries, i. e. digital libraries built by dynamically aggregating and appropriately presenting the pool of shared resources needed to fulfil the requirements of digital library communities. To support such an approach we introduced (i ) a reference model for understanding significant relationships among the components of digital libraries and for developing consistent services that support them and (ii ) a set of approaches and services able to provide virtual views over the heterogeneous information space resulting from reusing shared information sources. In particular, three approaches to information space virtualization are presented that provide profitable usage of the shared resources: information objects virtualization, collections virtualization, and distributed semantic search

Science of Digital Libraries(SciDL)

Our purpose is to ensure that people and institutions better manage information through digital libraries (DLs). Thus we address a fundamental human and social need, which is particularly urgent in the modern Information (and Knowledge) Age. Our goal is to significantly advance both the theory and state-of-theart of DLs (and other advanced information systems) - thoroughly validating our approach using highly visible testbeds. Our research objective is to leverage our formal, theory-based approach to the problems of defining, understanding, modeling, building, personalizing, and evaluating DLs. We will construct models and tools based on that theory so organizations and individuals can easily create and maintain fully functional DLs, whose components can interoperate with corresponding components of related DLs. This research should be highly meritorious intellectually. We bring together a team of senior researchers with expertise in information retrieval, human-computer interaction, scenario-based design, personalization, and componentized system development and expect to make important contributions in each of those areas. Of crucial import, however, is that we will integrate our prior research and experience to achieve breakthrough advances in the field of DLs, regarding theory, methodology, systems, and evaluation. We will extend the 5S theory, which has identified five key dimensions or onstructs underlying effective DLs: Streams, Structures, Spaces, Scenarios, and Societies. We will use that theory to describe and develop metamodels, models, and systems, which can be tailored to disciplines and/or groups, as well as personalized. We will disseminate our findings as well as provide toolkits as open source software, encouraging wide use. We will validate our work using testbeds, ensuring broad impact. We will put powerful tools into the hands of digital librarians so they may easily plan and configure tailored systems, to support an extensible set of services, including publishing, discovery, searching, browsing, recommending, and access control, handling diverse types of collections, and varied genres and classes of digital objects. With these tools, end-users will for be able to design personal DLs. Testbeds are crucial to validate scientific theories and will be thoroughly integrated into SciDL research and evaluation. We will focus on two application domains, which together should allow comprehensive validation and increase the significance of SciDL's impact on scholarly communities. One is education (through CITIDEL); the other is libraries (through DLA and OCKHAM). CITIDEL deals with content from publishers (e.g, ACM Digital Library), corporate research efforts e.g., CiteSeer), volunteer initiatives (e.g., DBLP, based on the database and logic rogramming literature), CS departments (e.g., NCSTRL, mostly technical reports), educational initiatives (e.g., Computer Science Teaching Center), and universities (e.g., theses and dissertations). DLA is a unit of the Virginia Tech library that virtually publishes scholarly communication such as faculty-edited journals and rare and unique resources including image collections and finding aids from Special Collections. The OCKHAM initiative, calling for simplicity in the library world, emphasizes a three-part solution: lightweightprotocols, component-based development, and open reference models. It provides a framework to research the deployment of the SciDL approach in libraries. Thus our choice of testbeds also will nsure that our research will have additional benefit to and impact on the fields of computing and library and information science, supporting transformations in how we learn and deal with information

Enhanced Publication Management System: a systemic approach towards modern scientific communication.

The impact of the digital revolution and the mass adoption of ICT affected only partially the scientific communication workflow. Scientists are today acquainted to scientific workflows, electronic data, software, e-science infrastructures for carrying out their daily research activities, but the dissemination of research results still relies on the bare scientific article, which simply shifted from being printed to digital. The scientific article alone, however, cannot support an effective assessment of research results or enable science reproducibility: to achieve this goal all products related to a research activity should be shared and disseminated. In the last decades, on the wave of Open Science, the scientific community has approached the problem of publishing research products different from the scientific article. One of the solutions is the paradigm of enhanced publications (EPs). EPs are digital objects that aggregate a digital scientific article and the other research products that have been used and produced during the research investigation described by the article and are useful to: (i) better interpret the article, (ii) enable more effective peer re- view, and (iii) facilitate or support reproducibility of science. Theory and practice of EPs is still not advanced and most Enhanced Publication Information Systems (EPISs) are custom implementations serving community specific needs. EPIS designers and developers have little or no technological support oriented to EPs. In fact, they realize EP-oriented software with a “from scratch” approach, addressing the peculiarities of the community to serve. Approach The aim of this thesis is to propose a systemic approach to the realisation of EPISs inspired by the lessons learned from the database domain. The state of the art of information systems and data models for EPs has been analyzed to identify the common features across different domains. Those common features have served as building blocks for the definition of a data model and functionalities for the representation and manipulation of EPs. The notion of Enhanced Publication Management System (EPMS) is introduced to denote information systems that provide EPIS designers and developers with EP-oriented tools for the setup, operation and maintenance of EPISs. The requirements of EPMSs have been identified and a reference software architecture that satisfies them is presented. Contributions The main contributions of this thesis relate to the fields of information science and scientific communication. The analysis of the state of the art about EPIS results in a terminology and a classification that can be useful as reference for the com- parison and discussion of such systems. A systemic approach, based on the novel notion of Enhanced Publication Management System (EPMS), is proposed as a more cost effective solution to the realization of EPIS, compared to the current “from scratch” strategy. A reference architecture for EPMSs and a general-purpose data model for EPs are pro- posed with the intent of contributing at building structured foundations of what is today becoming an area of research on its own