Expert View - Edward Fox

In addition to Europeana, it would help to have a number of examples where interoperability is useful. One is the National Science Digital Library in the U.S., where different Pathways and other projects manage sub-areas of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics education. But while there is OAI-PMH based interoperability, the user experience is far from convenient, for example, never knowing what will come up when a metadata record is brought forth. Nor is it possible to do browsing on more than a very superficial set of facets.
The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations has interesting interoperability issues regarding operations by students, their work with their mentors/examiners, their graduate program administrators, their library, the national library, the NDLTD Union Catalog, etc.

• Again, how can we browse on topic?
• What happens when metadata records are incomplete or erroneous?
• How can over time we deal with all types of content?
• What about policies of the department, college, university, nation?
• What about access restrictions, especially if for a fixed time period (e.g., 1 year)?

Another challenging example is the Crisis, Tragedy, and Recovery Network. We have many stakeholder groups with different needs: those affected, their families, their friends, their care givers, emergency workers, volunteers helping, psychiatrists, mental health professionals, health care professionals, administrators, policy makers, students, researchers and so on.  There are many types of contents: papers, news stories, videos, help manuals, emergency preparedness plans, testimonials, blogs, tweets, emails, cell phone messages, reports, law suits, government reports, survey data. This needs to run in a distributed way, working with different languages and cultures, nodes in each location, but sharing data. There needs to be data mining across the distributed collection, browsing, searching, GIS connection, visualization, data analysis, etc.

Edward Fox, Professor of Computer Science, Virginia Tech, U.S.