DELOS HighlightsDELOS Highlights

COSTANTINO THANOS

ITALIAN NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL

DELOS: A Network of Excellence DELOS: A Network of Excellence on Digital Librarieson Digital Libraries

Funded by the European Commission within the Sixth Framework Programme

Duration: 48 Months (2004 - 2007)

No. Members: 55

Funding: 6 Meuros

www.Delos.info

DELOS: A Network of Excellence DELOS: A Network of Excellence on Digital Librarieson Digital Libraries

DELOS coordinates a Joint Programme of

Activities of the major European teams working

in digital library related areas

DELOS Vision for Digital LibrariesDELOS Vision for Digital Libraries

Digital Libraries should enable any citizen to access all human knowledge, any time and anywhere, in a friendly, multi-modal, efficient, and effective way, by overcoming barriers of distance, language, and culture and by using multiple Internet-connected devices

DELOS Vision for Digital Libraries DELOS Vision for Digital Libraries (II)(II)

The New Generation Digital Libraries should not just be seen as static digital information repositories but as growing, interactively and collaboratively used nuclei of what will be, at some stage, a good part of human knowledge that depends as much on information as on communication

DELOS ObjectivesDELOS Objectives

The main objective of DELOS is to contribute to the development of the enabling technologies so that its Vision for Digital Libraries may become reality

DELOS Research ActivitiesDELOS Research Activities

Foundational ResearchReference Model for Digital Library Systems

Systems-related ResearchDigital Library Systems ArchitecturesInformation Access to Digital LibrariesAudio/Visual Digital LibrariesSemantic Interoperability in Digital Libraries

DELOS Research Activities (II)DELOS Research Activities (II)

User-related ResearchUser Interfaces for Digital LibrariesDigital Library VisualizationPersonalization in Digital Libraries

Horizontal IssuesDigital Library Curation and PreservationDigital RepositoriesDigital Library Evaluation MethodologiesDigital Library Evaluation Infrastructures

Reference Model for Digital Library Reference Model for Digital Library SystemsSystems

Objective:

To define a conceptual framework describing the:

architectural functional operational behavioral

characteristics of Digital Library Systems

Digital Library System ArchitecturesDigital Library System Architectures

The Fundamental Issue addressed:

To define an architecture on top of which DL systems can achieve all the desirable performance characteristics:

• Large-scale information distribution• Scalability• Availability• Robustness• Reliability• Interoperability• Adaptability

etc.

Digital Library System Architectures Digital Library System Architectures (II)(II)

Three Architectural Alternatives:

• Peer-to-Peer Architectures• Grid Middleware based Architectures• Service-Oriented Architectures

DELOS studies all three of these architectural directions and evaluates, analytically and experimentally, their impact on Digital Library System architectures.

Information Access to Digital Information Access to Digital LibrariesLibraries

Although not exclusive as in the past, Information Access will remain a central piece of the functionality of future Digital Libraries.

DELOS investigates several research problems broadly categorized as:

• Problems related to interactions with a single information provider

• Problems related to integrating information from multiple providers

Information Access to Digital Information Access to Digital Libraries (II)Libraries (II)

Problem: Information Integration

DELOS focuses on query routing in complex distributed Digital Libraries

Main questions addressed:

How queries are routed through the system and which criteria are used to choose the best nodes to route queries to

Audio/Visual Digital LibrariesAudio/Visual Digital Libraries

Audio/visual information represents a large percentage of the non-traditional objects that are found in Digital Libraries.

Objective:

To offer the appropriate functionality over such information

Main topics addressed:

• Automatic Metadata Extraction from Audio/Visual Information

• Content (and Context)-based Multimedia Information Retrieval

Semantic Interoperability in Digital Semantic Interoperability in Digital LibrariesLibraries

Issue: Techniques for semantic interoperability are very

important in reconciling differences among existing collections and presenting them as cohesive wholes

Approach: Emphasis on the investigation of methods for the

integration of heterogeneous ontologies and domain-specific knowledge organization systems

User Interfaces for Digital LibrariesUser Interfaces for Digital Libraries

Person-centricity of future Digital Libraries puts issues of user interfaces at the center stage of DELOS activities.

The objective:

To build a theoretical framework for the design of new Digital Library user interfaces and use it to implement advanced user-interface layers in future systems.

Approach

Effort is put on developing technology for task-centered user interfaces, which would self-adapt to the task attempted by the user at any one time.

User Interfaces for Digital User Interfaces for Digital Libraries(II)Libraries(II)

Collaboration-centric functionality .

DELOS puts effort towards the study of annotations

Objective

To develop comprehensive annotation models and building compliant systems that will permit users to add their personal opinion, thoughts, and memories to the global Digital Libraries and retrieve those of others.

Information PersonalizationInformation Personalization

Problem:

To adapt system behaviour to diverse user characteristics

Emphasis on

establishing the appropriate foundations for modeling user preferences and more general user context and then using the resulting models to personalize user interactions

Curation and PreservationCuration and Preservation

Issue: Need for long-term preservation of Digital Library

material

Relevant DELOS work on:• Integrating preservation functionality into the

overall Digital Library system design• Developing techniques for automating the process

of selection and ingest of materials into a preservation repository

Digital RepositoriesDigital Repositories

A new strategy in the scholarly communication

A set of services that an institution offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution members

Emphasis on

• Access policy (open access)• Operational environment• Digital repository infrastructures

EvaluationEvaluation

Issue: Digital Libraries need to be evaluated as systems and as

services to determine how useful, usable, and economic they are

Relevant DELOS work on:

• Development of a comprehensive theoretical framework for DL evaluation

• New evaluation methodologies• Development of toolkits and testbeds in order to enable new

evaluations

Evaluation (II)Evaluation (II)

Digital Library Evaluation Infrastructures:

• Cross-Language Retrieval

Digital Libraries contain information in many different languages. Effective access to this information, through interfaces that are equally varied linguistically, is critical to making Digital Libraries widely accepted

The Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) is the main international infrastructure and evaluation framework for cross-language information retrieval

Evaluation (III)Evaluation (III)

Digital Library Evaluation Infrastructures:

• XML Information Access

The “Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Document Access and Retrieval” (INEX) is an infrastructure and evaluation framework dealing with the performance of systems and services that provides access to XML-based Digital Libraries

DisseminationDissemination

• DELOS Digital Library• DELOS Web site• DELOS Newsletter• Research Exchange Programme• DELOS International Summer School• Brainstorming Workshops• Thematic Workshops

DELOS Main AchievementsDELOS Main Achievements

Generation of a set of comprehensive surveys and state-of-the-art reports covering the research areas of the Network

Development of demonstrators related to the research objectives of the Network.

Theoretical work related to the development of models related to the research activities of the Network.

Development of infrastructures to support large evaluation campaigns in the field of cross-language retrieval and XML retrieval