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By Carol Peters & Costantino Thanos - July 2000
The DELOS Network of Excellence for Digital Libraries aims at providing an open context in which an international agenda for future research in the digital libraries domain can be developed and continuously updated. Through a set of targeted activities, the Network will constitute a reference point for all DL projects funded by the 5th FP-IST, facilitating the exchange of experiences and know-how in this multidisciplinary domain, and will also establish close contacts with relevant application communities.
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Digital libraries represent a new infrastructure, created by the integration and use of computing, communications, and digital content on a worldwide scale [1]. They thus constitute the ideal vehicle for the storage, organisation, and sharing of knowledge in the global information society. There has been a rapid development of digital library technologies over the last few years. The digital library increasingly provides not just digitized text but also images, audio and video documents. This is due to the recent advances in storage capabilities for multimedia data that have made feasible the digital archiving of vast amounts of information from heterogeneous and distributed sources. It is now necessary to study and develop the most efficient tools to access and manipulate this information. For this reason, digital library technologies are now receiving increasing attention from both the research and application communities.
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| Figure 1: The Terrace of Lions on DELOS island, Greece |
However, the digital library must not be seen as merely an infrastructure to support a digitized collection of information objects together with a set of information management tools. It is an environment that brings together collections, services, and people in support of the full cycle of creation, dissemination, use, and preservation of data, information, and knowledge. The digital library domain is thus an essentially a complex multidisciplinary area covering a range of research topics including interoperability, metadata, information access, multilinguality, intellectual property rights, economic charging mechanisms, preservation and security issues. The challenges and opportunities that motivate advanced digital library initiatives are associated with this broad view of the digital library environment.
The DELOS Working Group, 1996-1999, funded by the ESPRIT LTR programme, was instrumental in promoting this view of the Digital Library and in organizing research and dissemination activities in the DL domain.
The objectives of the Working Group were to stimulate research activities in areas that are relevant for the efficient and cost-effective development of digital library systems, to encourage collaboration between research teams working in the field of digital libraries, to create links with on-going projects and activities in the field of digital libraries in industry and other public and private institutions, to build fruitful collaborations with the US DL research community, and to contribute to the creation of a European digital library research community. Through these activities, during its lifetime, DELOS became a point of reference for the European DL research community and a credible interlocutor with the US DL research community. In addition, the Working Group also involved a number of application communities in its activities. In many areas, such as electronic publishing, libraries, health care, cultural heritage, entertainment, protection of the environment, education, etc., the awareness has grown that the building of very large heterogeneous digital information repositories, accessible through global information infrastructures requires a considerable R&D effort in the digital library domain. Thus, we now have an application and industrial context that favours scientific and technological developments.
The DELOS Network of Excellence (NoE) for Digital Libraries [2] aims at both continuing and extending the activities of the DELOS Working Group. Its main objectives are:
An important feature of the Network of Excellence is its openness. All activities will be open to the European Digital Library research world and the relevant application communities (electronic publishing, libraries, cultural heritage, archives, etc). Links with the other DL research communities in the world will also be created. The network will be organised in a series of forums.
This activity will essentially have the objective of stimulating and coordinating actions aiming at the advancement of research in the digital library domain as well as at the improvement of the scientific collaboration between European research teams working in this area. The following mechanisms will be adopted: (i) a thematic workshop series, (ii) European conferences on Digital Libraries, and (iii) an international research exchange programme.
Thematic Workshop series
This series of workshops will give the opportunity to European researchers to present results of on-going research activities and to exchange opinions and experiences in an informal friendly environment. Position papers, progress reports on on-going projects and demos of running prototypes will constitute the main form of communication in these workshops. The expected spin-offs of these workshops will be i) useful cross-fertilization and ii) joint projects and research activities between European research teams.
The first Workshop in this series is scheduled for Autumn 2000 and will be on “Complex Queries and Relevance Feedback in Digital Libraries”. A number of proposals for future workshops have been submitted and are currently under consideration. These include: Heterogeneous DL Interoperability and Mediation; Personalization; Digital Libraries in the Educational System.
European Conference on Digital Libraries
The Network will support the European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL) series. This series of conferences was initiated by the DELOS WG in 1997. It is intended to give researchers from universities, research centers, industry and government the opportunity to meet once a year to discuss evolving research issues and applications. In particular its objectives are: to bring together researchers from multiple disciplines whose science relates to the development of digital libraries; to provide an opportunity for these scientists to form a research community in Europe specific to digital library development and to enable them to discuss issues and strategies specific to the European context; to enable review and discussion of research under way in Europe, in the US and in other parts of the world on digital libraries; to stimulate researchers, especially young scientists, to explore new areas of interest in digital library development; to establish a forum for the discussion of issues specific to Europe such as interoperability, multilinguality and intellectual property policy and information commerce. ECDL will establish cooperative links with the two major US DL conferences (ACM Digital Library Conference and the IEEE Advanced Digital Libraries Conferences) in order to coordinate their efforts and organize joint scientific events. ECDL 2000 [3] will be held in Lisbon, Portugal, 18-20 September.
International Research Exchange Programme
An International Research Exchange Programme will be promoted and implemented. The digital library is an interdisciplinary area and progress in this domain will require well-coordinated interdisciplinary skills and cooperation. Research exchanges, therefore, are of particular importance. ERCIM, the coordinator of the NoE, has a successful tradition in organizing and coordinating interdisciplinary research cooperation and in providing a flexible platform for international exchange in research and development. The standard form of research exchange is that of scientific visits between members of research groups. Such exchanges will involve Ph.D students, post-doc, and accomplished researchers. Financial support for this activity will be sought from the “Marie Curie” fellowship programme.
Evaluation in the context of a digital library means defining new metrics for components and new combinations of components in order to measure all sorts of performance aspects related to interoperability, metadata and resource discovery, and multilingual accesses. To achieve this objective the NoE will promote the building of publicly available reusable evaluation infrastructures. Two different testbeds are being created, maintained and operated: (i) a digital library test suite and (ii) a cross-language system evaluation infrastructure.
Digital Library Test Suite
A Digital Library Test Suite will be built up with the aim of accelerating and enhancing research into digital libraries. Such research needs large testbeds to evaluate and demonstrate new concepts. In recent and coming years, several excellent collections have been/will be created with EU funding. To maximize the benefit of this work and in collaboration with their owners, the DELOS NoE will undertake the task of promoting the creation, maintenance and operation of a Test Suite which will make such testbeds available to other researchers. This action will improve the efficiency of research since the Test Suite will provide all researchers with readily available resources for testing purposes. Research results are most valuable when they are compared with other approaches and validated against many sets of data. Because of the lack of suitable testbeds, most digital library projects only test their research prototypes against their own testbeds, thus making methods difficult to compare. The Test Suite will provide collections for comparative and quantitative experiments. It is planned to link this activity with the US D-Lib Working Group on Digital Library Metrics [4] and the D-Lib Test Suite initiative [5] coordinated by the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI). So far, this initiative makes five testbeds available developed by: Carnegie Mellon University, Cornell University, University of California – Berkeley, University of California – Santa Barbara, University of Illinois. Contacts between the DELOS NoE and CNRI have already been established.
Cross-Language System Evaluation Infrastructure
Until very recently, the international information networks were dominated by the English language. The situation is now in rapid evolution and the volumes of information available over the global networks in languages other than English is increasing much faster than for English. The user community of such knowledge sources is thus creating enormous pressure for the development of systems that provide access to information without language or cultural barriers. For these reasons, Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) is a key topic for the Digital Library domain. However, the development of CLIR systems implies the need for suitable methodologies and tools to evaluate system performance.
In collaboration with the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) series organized by NIST (the US National Institute for Standards) for the evaluation of different types of information retrieval systems, the DELOS NoE has set up a Cross Language Evaluation Forum [6] for the study and discussion of multiple language information access technologies and for cross-language system evaluation. This activity and the methodology adopted is discussed in reference [7]. The results of the first evaluation campaign will be presented at a Workshop organised in conjunction with ECDL 2000, in Lisbon, Portugal, 21-22 September.
A number of emerging Web standards will provide much of the basic architecture for digital libraries (RDF, Dublin Core, INDECS, DIENST protocol, UNICODE, XML, Z39.50, etc.). Many of these standards have just begun to move from research to deployment. Implementers will need to follow the progress of research, while researchers will need to monitor the experience of early adopters. The refinement of a stable architecture for digital libraries will require several iterations as these standards are adapted for various applications. The Standardisation Forum of the DELOS NoE is currently planning to focus on issues related to the deployment of standard metadata schemas and of related infrastructures for publishing, registering, and cross-linking application schemas based on standards.
One (or two) DELOS working groups will examine the relation between standards for high-level resource description, such as Dublin Core, and standards for fine-grained description within specialised applications, and how multiple standards can be used in combination to address the unique needs of applications. This issue will be the focus of a metadata workshop organised by the Standardisation Forum at an EC concertation event presenting projects sponsored by the Digital Heritage and Cultural Content programme, in Vienna, 30 June, 2000 [8].
The training and technology transfer actions which will be undertaken by the DELOS NoE aim at convincing European organizations of the effectiveness and benefits of the employment of digital library technologies within industrial/commercial environments. It is widely accepted that the lack of a quick and wide-spread “take-up” of new technologies is one of the major problems of Europe, compared with other continents. The DELOS NoE will disseminate information on its activities not only to the research world, but also to the relevant application and industrial communities and will also undertake the following take-up measures.
International Summer School
Summer Schools will be oraginised focussing on the state-of-the-art in selected DL technologies. The schools will be directed towards members of the research community (in the wide sense): primarily graduate students, but also young researchers and professionals involved in R&D in DL- related areas. The first school will be directed by Professor Hans Roosendaal, University of Twente, the Netherlands, and is scheduled for summer 2001.
Training
A training programme will be organized which will consist of specific technology transfer courses in selected application domains. These courses will present digital library technologies and successful case studies in a customized manner to user communities. They must be focused on specific application/commercial environments, on their demonstrative mission, and on their window of opportunity. The aim should be to organise 2-3 tutorials per year, generally in conjunction with annual events of relevant associations (e.g. IFLA – International Federation of Librarians; FIAT/IFTA - The International Federation of Television Archives, etc.)
DLs are inherently distributed, which is part of their appeal, and it is crucial to share aspects such as standards to ensure that the functions a digital library provides are useful in a global, multi-lingual, and multi-cultural environment. The NoE will seek to establish collaborative actions with other research communities. In particular, collaborations already established by the DELOS WG (with the US, Russian, and Japanese DL research communities) will be reinforced and extended to include other countries (for ex. the countries of the Mediterranean area) with which an agreement for scientific cooperation under the 5th Framework was defined by the European Union. Three forms of cooperation are envisioned:
The DELOS-US Collaboration aims at
The DELOS-Russian Collaboration aims at
The DELOS Collaboration with non-EU Mediterranean countries aims at
The first specific activity will be a Workshop to be held at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane in November 2000. Participants will be experts from the NoE who will present the state of the art in key DL areas (e.g. interoperability, metadata, multilinguality) and scientists from non-EU Mediterranean countries already working in DL-related fields. A major objective of the workshop will be to evaluate the possibilities of establishing collaborations between EC-funded groups and partners from this area and to identify the key issues for such collaborations
The DELOS Collaboration with Japan, Canada and South America aims at
In order to guarantee that the objectives of the Network will be successfully achieved, an assessment activity will be carried out during the Network’s life cycle. This activity will be performed by an external body, the NoE International Advisory Board. The main tasks of the Advisory Board will be the assessment of the results achieved by DELOS during the past year and the approval of a detailed specification of the Network’s activities for the following year.
For more information on the activities of the DELOS Network of Excellence, see the Web site or contact the Network Director: Costantino Thanos [11].
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Carol Peters
Istituto di Elaborazione della Informazione
CNR
Pisa
Italy
carol@iei.pi.cnr.it
<http://www.iei.pi.cnr.it>
Phone: +39 050 3152897
Costantino Thanos
Istituto di Elaborazione della Informazione
CNR
Pisa
Italy
thanos@iei.pi.cnr.it
<http://www.iei.pi.cnr.it>
Phone: +39 050 3152910
Costantino Thanos is Head of the Information Engineering Dept. of the Istituto di Elaborazione della Informazione - an Institute of the Italian National Research Council in Pisa. He has been/is coordinator of a number of EC projects in the digital library or related areas currently including ECHO: European Chronicles On-line, a DL of film archives, and SCHOLNET, a DL service for a scholarly community. He was the Coordinator of the DELOS Working Group and is Director of the DELOS Network of Excellence for Digital Libraries.
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For citation purposes:
Peters, P. & Thanos, C. "DELOS: A Network of Excellence for Digital Libraries",
Cultivate Interactive, issue 1, 3 July 2000
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue1/delos/>
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