• The Reference Model (V1.0) with Yannis Ioannidis, Professor at the University of Athens and DL.org partner explaining why modelling makes our lives in the Digital Library space easier and pinpoints the core concepts on which our Ref model is grounded.
• The Cookbook (Ready for Comment version) with Leonardo Candela from the National Research Council of Italy offering insights into best practices and current solutions proposed for Digital Library interoperability, which is key to taking DLs to the next level.

Athens Workshop, 13 December 2010

Perspectives from Veria Central Library, a new DL.org Strategic Alliance, are brought by Yannis Trohopoulos &  Vaggelis Banos, taking the floor to discuss heterogeneity in European Digital Libraries with the spotlight on the EC’s Europeana initiative to ensure Europe’s cultural heritage is not only accessible to all citizens but also preserved for new generations in the years to come. One of our experts in our Quality Working Group, Sarantos Kapidakis, a professor at the Laboratory on Digital Libraries and Electronic Publishing, Ionian University, looks at interoperability approaches for metadata. Participants will get the chance to debate all of these topics throughout the morning session before the networking lunch.

The rest of the Workshop focuses on demos illustrating a diverse set of Digital Library functionalities from a European perspective:

• Europeana
• TEL & TELplus
• Access-IT
• DRIVER & OpenAIRE
• D4Science.

The event wraps up with an interactive discussion, demonstrating how concerted efforts can ensure  a better understanding of both the role of Reference Models  and of how interoperability challenges are being addressed by DL.org. By doing so, DL.org aims to help narrow the gap between theory and practice so practioners and researchers alike are in a much stronger position to tackle the challenges that lie ahead.

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 keynote from Stefan Gradmann, a distinguished member of the community, helped set the scene of the Workshop with some insightful background information.

Stefan Gradmann, Humboldt University: Keynote

Within the framework of the European Commission’s i2010 (Lisbon) Agenda, Digital Libraries (DLs) represent one of the three “flagship initiatives”, with the aim of setting up the European Digital Library as a common, multilingual access point to Europe’s distributed digital cultural heritage, encompassing a broad spectrum of content representing European cultural heritage. Interoperability was placed high on the agenda set by the EC as part of this vision. The EC established an Interoperability Group comprising high-level experts, including Stefan Gradmann, chartered with contributing to the short-term DL agenda by pinpointing short-term actions and putting forward recommendations for an action plan based on a list of prioritized feasible options. The Interoperability Group was also invited to make contributions to the long-term agenda by identifying key elements for a long-term strategy. One of the initial conclusions was that the plethora of definitions on interoperability brings little value-add from a strategic and technical perspective, as highlighted by the European Committee on Interoperable Software (ECIS).

The keynote highlighted how interoperability challenges in Digital Libraries (DLs) are mostly conceptual with some technical issues and a few political aspects around this core notion. Special emphasis was placed on Europeana, a multilingual access point to Europe’s cultural heritage, where interoperability plays a fundamental role, as well as several frameworks, including the DELOS DL Reference Model, which DL.org is enhancing and consolidating by harnessing expertise inside the project and through its six thematic working groups, each one addressing interoperability from a different angle with initial findings presented at the Workshop.

Stefan Gradmann highlighted some strengths and shortcomings of the DELOS model identified during the activities of the Expert Group. While the Model is very abstract rooted in computer science with less relevance to the reality of cultural institutions, it offers a very good starting point for conceptual work and a valuable tool in courses on library and information science.

During the Q&A, Stefan Gradmann explained that there is a different degree of contextualization between eScience and cultural institutions in general. Information objects are more contextual for cultural institutions. Hence the need for any Reference Model to take on board a wider perspective. Another point stressed revolved around the use of the term “Digital Libraries”.

Another key point that resonated during the closing interactive discussion revolved around the use of the term “Digital Library”. In Gradmann’s mind, the application of the term should be called into question in some instances and we must also bear in mind that there are different types of DLs.

Chair: Costantino Thanos, CNR-ISTI

Holiday Palace, Corfu: Workshop Venue

Welcome to this Blog Cast taking you behind the scenes of the 1st DL.org Workshop during ECDL2009 on 1 October 2009 in Corfu, where over 50 people from across Europe,  Asia, South Africa and the U.S. gathered  to learn about DL.org’s innovative and comprehensive approach to the highly complex issue of DL interoperability.

A set of engaging, informative, high-quality talks focused on interoperability challenges, new research findings and future research developments, concluding with an interactive discussion serving as a springboard for further deliberations.

All these aspects are covered in this Blog Cast.