Citeseer-api: towards seamless resource location and interlinking for digital libraries

We introduce CiteSeer-API, a public API to CiteSeer-like services. CiteSeer-API is SOAP/WSDL based and allows for easy programmatical access to all the specific functionalities offered by CiteSeer services, including full text search of documents and citations and citation-based document discovery. In order to enable operability and interlinking with arbitrary software agents and digital library systems, CiteSeer-API uses digital content signatures to create system-independent handles for the Document, Citation and Group resources of CiteSeer servers. We discuss specific functionalities of CiteSeer-API that take advantage of these handlers in order to enable seamless location of CiteSeer resources. Finally we argue that the digital signature scheme used by CiteSeer-API is well suited for the creation of machine-usable semantic descriptions of digital library services which is the key toward seamless discovery and integration of services such as CiteSeer-API. CiteSeer-API is currently showcased on CiteSeer.IST, the CiteSeer server of the School o

A Service-Oriented Architecture for Digital Libraries

CiteSeer is currently a very large source of meta-data information on the World Wide Web (WWW). This meta-data is the key material for the Semantic Web. Still, CiteSeer is not yet a Semantic-enabled service and therefore its meta-data, although potentially usable by Semantic Web agents, is not yet reachable using the Semantic Web mechanisms. The complexity of CiteSeer, that is the range of tasks it supports, make the transition to a Semantic-enabled service a non-trivial task. While human users tend to perceive CiteSeer as a single well-integrated service, we believe it is best seen -- from a machine perspective -- as a collection of services, each service performing a specific task. In this paper we show our approach to enable CiteSeer on the Semantic Web in order to allow the use of its meta-data through the Semantic Web. We first introduce an intuitive Application Programming Interface (API) to the CiteSeer software, then show that an efficient integration of CiteSeer in the Semantic Web can be best achieved by independently integrating the services that comprise it. We believe the effort presented here towards the Semantic-integration of a complex Information Retrieval system could be used as an integration model for arbitrary systems

WS-Specification: Specifying Web Services Using UDDI Improvements

Web services are interoperable components that can be used in application-integration and component-based application development. In so doing, the appropriate specification of Web services, as the basis for discovery and configuration, becomes a critical success factor. This paper analyses the UDDI specification framework, which is part of the emerging Web service architecture, and proposes a variety of improvements referring both to the provided information and the appropriate formal notations. This leads to a more sophisticated specification framework that is called WS-Specification and provides information referring to different perspectives on Web services. It considers Web service acquisition, architecture, security, performance, conceptual concepts and processes, interface definitions, assertions, and method coordination. WS-Specification thereby maintains backward-compatibility to UDDI and is ordered using a thematic grouping that consists of white, yellow, blue, and green pages