Date: 9 November 2010, Parma, Italy
Venue: Biblioteca Civica, University of Parma, Vicolo Santa Maria 5, Parma, 9.00-17.30.
Registration: Participation to the seminar is free, but for organizational reason it is necessary to register in advance. Please send an email with your name and your affiliation to Christin Mollenhauer (christin.mollenhauer@nemo.unipr.it).
Hosts: DL.org European project, DILL International Master, University of Parma

New strategic alliance: DL.org has forged an alliance with Digital Library Learning (DILL), a Master Programme under the European Union’s Erasmus Mundus Programme with the aim of offering a springboard on education and training on digital libraries.

Event in detail

Parma, setting for Seminar, 9 Nov 2010

The information society in general and digital libraries in particular can be researched from different perspectives and angles: Digital libraries are, for example, technological systems and can be researched as such; but they are also organizations and they can be researched also in that respect; they are arenas for information seeking behaviour and for social processes such as learning and knowledge sharing, which can be another dimension of research; they are collections of content that need curation (collection, description, preservation, retrieval, etc); they are social institutions with a social mandate, and as such they are affected by social, demographic and legal issues.
This  one-day seminar, as a forum for discussion between the research communities participating in the DL.org activities and the communities of Digital Library education in Europe. The main aim of the seminar is to energise thinking on research and education in digital library and explore ways fto foster closer co-operation between them.

• Start discussing how to implement a European scale mechanism for exchanging, sharing and integrating research results into education in digital libraries.
• Start defining research topics suitable for PhD students to ease the integration of research done in European projects and research done in Universities.
• Discuss how the interoperability research results of DL.org can be transferred to education in digital libraries.

Seminar features include presentations on the topic and a round-table debate.

To  achieve this goal, Europeana has to solve many interoperability issues. These fall into two main categories, that is, issues arising:

• from the provider side, that is, when gathering content from provider institutions
• from the consumer side, that is, when third parties use the Europeana services either as end-users or as service providers.

In the first instance, Europeana must interoperate with memory institutions to get the metadata used to offer its services. This is currently achieved by adopting a standard solution, namely the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, or OAI-PMH for short.  Once Europeana acquires the data, it has to map it from the original format to the Europeana Data Model. This mapping requires the knowledge of the semantics of the source and target data models. It can thus be regarded as a semantic interoperability problem at the content level.

And the consumer side?

Europeana is making its contents available through a number of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), each one addressing the needs of a particular category of users. These APIs will be used by consumers to obtain services from Europeana based on the outcomes of negotiations between the parties concerned.

By contrast, DL.org is aimed at developing a comprehensive framework that characterises various interoperability challenges and promoting solutions systematically. Within this framework, representatives from major initiatives and on-going projects can work with DL.org, deliberating key issues, sharing experiences and expertise, working on the interoperability of their solutions, and promoting shared standards. DL.org expects to provide the DL research and application community with a deeper understanding that will pave the way towards innovative foundational and technical advances.

In particular, the project is facing the interoperability challenge from diverse perspectives, encompassing architecture, content, functionality, policy, quality, and user, aimed at contributing to raising awareness on the intrinsically multi-faceted nature of interoperability.

The Role of the enhanced DL Reference Model

As a result, the enhanced Reference Model (V1.0 with new versions planned) characterises the DL universe in terms of well-established concepts and relationships, thus providing a conceptual framework within which interoperability issues can be addressed.

DL Technology & Methodology Cookbook

This outcome will be enforced by the DL containing guidelines, best practices, enabling technologies and approaches guiding DL developers and designers with off-the-shelf certified solutions ready to be used when dealing with interoperability.

DL.org & Europeana Strategic Alliance
Because of their complementary missions, DL.org and Europeana can benefit from the outcomes achieved by both projects. The outcomes of the research conducted by DL.org can be effectively leveraged by Europeana during its next phases when a more sophisticated interaction scheme with providers and consumers will be defined. Vice versa, the experiences and knowledge gained by Europeana provides extremely valuable input and feedback to DL.org activities.

How do we interact?

DL.org & Europeana work together on different levels. Several Europeana experts are members of DL.org’s Working Groups:

Carlo Meghini, Institute of Information Science & Technologies at the National Research Centre of Italy and Stefan Gradmann, Humboldt University (Germany) are both members of the Content Working Group.

Bram van der Werf serves as a member of the Architecture Working Group.

Read our interview with Jill Cousins, Director of Europeana.

The morning session continued with three talks on DL.org’s approach to interoperability from the perspective of content, functionality and user.

Donatella Castelli, Content Interoperability

Donatella Castelli (CNR-ISTI), DL.org co-ordinator, described the mission and scope of the Content Working Group , placing emphasis on specific interoperability problems in this domain, such as:

• Information objects, abstraction levels, metadata.

• A subset of information objects that characterize aspects related to common interoperability issues encompass: information object attributes, format, context, provenance, and identifier.

This WG is currently developing a comprehensive interoperability framework that captures the multi-faceted nature of interoperability issues and solutions, as well as evaluating existing approaches and solutions.

Dagobert Soergel, University at Buffalo, presented the main objectives of DL.org’s Functionality Working Group with special reference to:

• Interoperability use cases, Function Interoperability Framework that the Working Group will produce.

• Scenarios and requirements for interoperability and reuse in the functionality domain.

Dagobert Soergel, Functionality Interoperability

Interoperability issues include Application Programming Interface (API) mismatch, as well as mismatches in programming environments and data formats. The talk also drew attention to the need to set up an environment in which the DL community can produce a database of function descriptions.

The ultimate goal of the Functionality WG is to promote rich functionality over a wide range of
systems with a consistent interface; promote best practices and innovation by educating DL designers, developers, administrators, and users about the rich array of DL functionality. The goal is also to enable finding and reusing software modules that implement desired functionality  for developers: reuse existing modules and design for interoperability, for DL managers: implement cutting-edge functionality in configuring a DL system and for users: run a module “on the fly” to accomplish a task. Another goal is to enable federated search.

Yannis Ioannidis, University of Athens, focused his talk on User interoperability, outlining the main goals of the dedicated DL.org Working Group. He explained the meaning of a “DL actor”, which can be an individual, a group of people acting in unison, or as inanimate entities (software programmes and interfaces).

Yannis Ioannidis, User Interoperability

The talk also looked at user modelling, interoperable user models, user profiling, user context, user management, interoperable user management, collaboration, participation and privacy, while also defining the scope of the dedicated Working Group within DL.org in terms of tackling interoperability issues.

Q&A

Functionality:

“In terms of DL specifics, the ultimate goal is about building or creating new functions based on what is already available through a bottom-up approach.” Dagobert Soergel, University at Buffalo.

User:

Q: When it comes to the User concept, what are we dealing with in terms of interoperability?

A: “It has mostly to do with processes, ultimately it will have to use data. Important to bear in mind that there is not always a third person involved and that the rules and ways of exchanging are very different. Resolving the issue on an interoperability level is not enough because we need to establish how users can interact with each other. We need to model it. While solutions developed elsewhere may be valuable, it is important to appreciate that we are dealing here with intricate things.“ Yannis Ioannidis, University of Athens.

“Look at other solutions in the ICT domain, on order to understand which ones DL.org could leverage or how it could collaborate. The more useful this is, the better.” Geneva Henry, Rice University, U.S.

Chair: Geneva Henry, Rice University and member of DL.org’s External Advisory Board