Expert View - Sarantos Kapidakis

On Interoperability: Policy versus Quality

I am in the Quality Working group, and have found a close relation of our issues with policy:

• The Policy expresses what the goal of a Digital Library is.
• The policy can cover technical issues, like the maximum response time of a system.
• The definition of a realistic policy is a very difficult task.

Quality is the degree that the DL conforms to the specified policy. So, quality serves  to measure the effective behaviour and to compare it with the desired behaviour of the DL. This makes quality and policy to be described using the same language: Quality is described be a pair of the current and the desired behaviour.

On Interoperability: Quality and Policy v.s. other issues
Quality (and policy) are not in parallel but intersect with other issues: There is content quality, functionality quality, architecture quality, etc, that is the other core domains characterising a Digital Library as captured by the DELOS Reference Model.*
Each individual quality could be examined in the examination of its own issue. For example content quality could be examined with content. And the total quality could deal with the combined quality, and the effects of the individual quality factors to the overall quality. For example, how the timeouts (from the system architecture – that make some of the results inaccessible) and the quality of the sources affects the quality of the resutls.
This overall quality is also a very difficult problem.

Sarantos Kapidakis, Professor of Informatics, Department of Archives & Library Services, Ionian University, Corfu, Greece

* The DELOS Digital Library Reference Model is informed by the expertise of the international DL research and scientific community working together in recent years through an initiative spearheaded by DELOS, an EC-funded Network of Excellence. The Reference Model is currently being taken forward by DL.org, which is addressing interoperability, reference modelling and best practices from a comprehensive and innovative approach encompassing the six concepts captured in the DELOS Reference Model: content, functionality, user, policy, quality and architecture. Current version of the Reference Model. An further enhanced and consolidated Reference Model will be available this autumn.