DRIV(ER)ing Research Infrastructures

Yannis Ioannidis

University of Athens, Hellas

1st DRIVER Summit: Towards a Confederation of Digital Repositories, 16-17/1/2008, Göttingen

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DRIVER

• Digital• Repository• Infrastructure• Vision for• European• Research

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=? Research

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Imperatives

1. Comprehensive, global access to any type of scientific information

2. Minimum time and resources effort to access and use this information

3. Easy search/navigation, handling, manipulation, and re-dissemination of information

4. Maximum visibility to and communication with the research community, research impact

5. Long-term access and preservation of research results

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High-Level Objectives

• Develop an environment for integrating existing national, regional, or thematic repositories

• Create a production-quality European DR infrastructure

• Prepare the future expansion and upgrade of the DR infrastructure across Europe

• Identify and promote the use of a relevant set of standards

• Raise awareness among user communities

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Challenges

Create a

European

Repository

Infrastructure

Large number of providers and users

Emphasis on content and services

Hosting hardware and software

Operational infrastructure, open for experimentations

Multifaceted endeavor:technology, organization

Organisation

Data

Software

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Universal DRs

Past-Present-Future

National, Regional, and Thematic DRs

Trans-National DRs (DRIVER)

Pan-European and Inter-Thematic DRs

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Repository Systems effortsIndividual institution site

Information Space

Index

Search

Index

UI

…

• Centralized System

• High installation and

maintenance cost for

hardware and software

• Poor & limited scalability

• Reuse by data and service

duplication!

Functionalityresources

Contentresources

OA

I-P

MH

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Repository Systems effortsMultiple institution sites

• Repeated efforts

• High installation and

maintenance cost for

hardware and software

• Poor & limited scalability

• Reuse by data and service

duplication!

• Disconnected repositories

… ……

……

……

…

…

…

… …

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Repository Systems effortsSharing and reusing content

OAI-PMH

Institution Site

OAI-PMH

Institution Site

OAI-PMH

Institution Site

…

Aggregator

Information Space

Index

Search

Index

UI

…

• Centralized System

• High installation and

maintenance cost for

hardware and software

• Poor & limited scalability

• Reuse by data duplication!

Functionalityresources

Contentresources

OA

I-P

MH

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Repository Systems effortsSharing and reusing content

…

…

Netherlands…

…

Belgium…

…

Italy

…

…

Greece…

…

Germany

…

…

…..

…

…

India

…

…

E-Theses …

…

Genetic Data

…

…

wwPDB…

…

…..

• Repeated efforts

• High installation and

maintenance cost for

hardware and software

• Poor & limited scalability

• Reuse by data and service

duplication!

• Disconnected repositories

• Sometimes desired policy

• Often undesirable

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DRIVER Infrastructure Vision

Moving frombuilding individual repositories

or repository clusters,one at a time,

repeating “things” again and again,to building

a “generating engine”,a warehouse,

an INFRASTRUCTURE,facilitating the above by offering

appropriate generic, reusable services

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DRIVER Infrastructure Vision

• Build and maintain

a sustainable European environment

where content and functionality resources

can be openly shared and integrated

for use by any application or community

• Sustainability- Maintainability- Scalability- Reusability

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DRIVER Infrastructure

Aggregator

Index

Search

Index

UI

…

Aggregator

UI

Search

Index

Store

OAI-PMH OAI-PMH

Institution Site

…OAI-PMH

Institution Site

OAI-PMH

Institution Site

…

Institution Site

ContentResources

Information

ManagerManager

AuthnAuthz

Enabling Services

Content/DataServices

FunctionalityServices

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• Fully flexible and dynamic– Repositories – Users – Communities– …– Services

• Fully distributed System– Services are implemented as Web Services– Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

• Advantages– Scalability both on the data provided or the usage/load– Extensibility of functionalities is easily accomplished

Technological features

System Resources

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Enabling Services

• Infrastructure management and service/resource

gluing: handles all the nitty-gritty generic tasks (like an operating system)– Knowledge of all DRIVER Resources– Monitoring and coordination of Service interactions– Provides Authorization & Authentication mechanisms

Information

ManagerManager

AuthnAuthz

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Content/Data Services

• Information Space Management– Harvesting from external repositories

– Aggregating: cleaning & enriching

– Storage, indexing

– Virtualization of content: collections

– OAI-Publishing of harvested data

Aggregator

Index Index

Aggregator

Index

Store Collection

OAI-Publisher

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Functionality Services

• User-content based services– User Interfaces– Information (Content) Search & Browse

• Personalized services– User and Communities – User Profiling– User recommendations & alerts

Search

UI UI

Search

Profiling

Communities

Alerts/Recommendations

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New Repository Scenario

Aggregator

Index

Search

Index

UI

…

Aggregator

UI

Search

Index

Store

OAI-PMH

OAI-PMH

Institution Site

…OAI-PMH

Institution Site

OAI-PMH

Institution Site

…

Institution Site

ContentResources

Information

ManagerManager

AuthnAuthz

Enabling Services

Content/DataServices

FunctionalityServices

OAI-PMH

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New Service Scenario

Index

Search

Index

UI

…

Aggregator

UI

Search

Index

Store

OAI-PMH

Institution Site

…OAI-PMH

Institution Site

OAI-PMH

Institution Site

…

Institution Site

ContentResources

Information

ManagerManager

AuthnAuthz

Enabling Services

Content/DataServices

FunctionalityServices

OAI-PMH

Validation

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DRIVER European Information Space

Enabling Layer

Data Layer

Functionality Layer

Repositories

• Services for the creation, maintenance, and access to the European Information Space

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Data sharing & Service reuse

• Belgium scenario– Use European DRIVER infra– Have a storage/Index for themselves– Provide their (Belgian) data to Europe

• E-theses scenario– Include European theses documents in overall infra– Make these visible through virtual mechanisms

(collections) for specialized searches

• India Scenario– Deploy DRIVER infrastructure for all their repositories

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DRIVER infrastructure: the benefits

Enabling Layer

Data Layer

Functionality Layer

Repositories

DRIVER Infrastructure

DLS(Belgium)

DLS(India?)

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Current DRIVER content

> 200,000 documents

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Current DRIVER deployment

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Current state of production

• First TEST-BED released (v1.0)• Enabling Layer: Services deployed on DRIVER sites

across Europe• Data Layer: now aggregating 70 Repositories from 6

Countries (FR,BE,NL,DE,UK, IT)• Functionality Layer: delivering Search User Interface

with special functionalities: collections, recommendations, communities

• One running DIS: “DRIVER European Information Space” counting 51 reps, for 250.000 Open Access docs

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Content Resources

• Focus on Institutional Repositories– Rapid progress over the last years– Inherent sustainability (e.g. libraries)– Adequate technical homogeneity (OAI-PMH)

• Textual data

• Selection of IRs based on– Maturity– Policies– Technologies used

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Content Sources

• Initially 51 institutional repositories– 15 from the Netherlands (coordinated by DARE)– 20 from the UK (coordinated by SHERPA)– 14 from Germany (adhere to the German DINI-standard)– 1 from France (CNRS)– 1 from Belgium (UGent)

• Later raised to 70+ and growing• More repositories to be identified and included• Joint policies and objectives• Broad and multiple user groups• Metadata, technical, and organisational standards

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Future issues

• Towards release v1.1• Addition of new DISs sharing the European

Information Space– Belgium– Ireland– Electronic Theses and Dissertations– India?– more to come…

• New content types, and compound documents/scientific objects

• New functionality services

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Simple Search Scenario

UI

Index

IS

RSSearch

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DRIVER portal

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DRIVER Activities

Content:Organisationand Provision

Content:Organisationand Provision

Infrastructure MiddlewareDevelopment/

Implementation

Infrastructure MiddlewareDevelopment/

Implementation

Focussed Studies Raising Awareness /Outreach Programme

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DRIVER Funding

• DRIVER project: 18 months (6/06-11/07)– An organization and a testbed system

• DRIVER2 project: 24 months (12/07-11/09)– A confederation and a production system– Research on next-generation issues

• DRIVERn project• Driver Confederation members• Member states

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Summary

www.driver-community.eu

DRIVER drives Europe towards full unificationof its scientific information