1. DELOS Highlights
COSTANTINO THANOS
ITALIAN NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL

2. DELOS: A Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries
Funded by the European Commission within the Sixth Framework Programme
Duration: 48 Months ( )
No. Members: 55
Funding: 6 Meuros

3. DELOS: A Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries
DELOS coordinates a Joint Programme of
Activities of the major European teams working
in digital library related areas

4. DELOS Vision for Digital Libraries
Digital Libraries should enable any citizen to access all human knowledge, any time and anywhere, in a friendly, multi-modal, efficient, and effective way, by overcoming barriers of distance, language, and culture and by using multiple Internet-connected devices

5. DELOS Vision for Digital Libraries (II)
The New Generation Digital Libraries should not just be seen as static digital information repositories but as growing, interactively and collaboratively used nuclei of what will be, at some stage, a good part of human knowledge that depends as much on information as on communication

6. DELOS Objectives
The main objective of DELOS is to contribute to the development of the enabling technologies so that its Vision for Digital Libraries may become reality

7. DELOS Research Activities
Foundational Research
Reference Model for Digital Library Systems
Systems-related Research
Digital Library Systems Architectures
Information Access to Digital Libraries
Audio/Visual Digital Libraries
Semantic Interoperability in Digital Libraries

8. DELOS Research Activities (II)
User-related Research
User Interfaces for Digital Libraries
Digital Library Visualization
Personalization in Digital Libraries
Horizontal Issues
Digital Library Curation and Preservation
Digital Repositories
Digital Library Evaluation Methodologies
Digital Library Evaluation Infrastructures

9. Reference Model for Digital Library Systems
Objective:
To define a conceptual framework describing the:
architectural
functional
operational
behavioral
characteristics of Digital Library Systems

10. Digital Library System Architectures
The Fundamental Issue addressed:
To define an architecture on top of which DL systems can achieve all the desirable performance characteristics:
Large-scale information distribution
Scalability
Availability
Robustness
Reliability
Interoperability
Adaptability
etc.

11. Digital Library System Architectures (II)
Three Architectural Alternatives:
Peer-to-Peer Architectures
Grid Middleware based Architectures
Service-Oriented Architectures
DELOS studies all three of these architectural directions and evaluates, analytically and experimentally, their impact on Digital Library System architectures.

12. Information Access to Digital Libraries
Although not exclusive as in the past, Information Access will remain a central piece of the functionality of future Digital Libraries.
DELOS investigates several research problems broadly categorized as:
Problems related to interactions with a single information provider
Problems related to integrating information from multiple providers

13. Information Access to Digital Libraries (II)
Problem: Information Integration
DELOS focuses on query routing in complex distributed Digital Libraries
Main questions addressed:
How queries are routed through the system and which criteria are used to choose the best nodes to route queries to

14. Audio/Visual Digital Libraries
Audio/visual information represents a large percentage of the non-traditional objects that are found in Digital Libraries.
Objective:
To offer the appropriate functionality over such information
Main topics addressed:
Automatic Metadata Extraction from Audio/Visual Information
Content (and Context)-based Multimedia Information Retrieval

15. Semantic Interoperability in Digital Libraries
Issue:
Techniques for semantic interoperability are very important in reconciling differences among existing collections and presenting them as cohesive wholes
Approach:
Emphasis on the investigation of methods for the integration of heterogeneous ontologies and domain-specific knowledge organization systems

16. User Interfaces for Digital Libraries
Person-centricity of future Digital Libraries puts issues of user interfaces at the center stage of DELOS activities.
The objective:
To build a theoretical framework for the design of new Digital Library user interfaces and use it to implement advanced user-interface layers in future systems.
Approach
Effort is put on developing technology for task-centered user interfaces, which would self-adapt to the task attempted by the user at any one time.

17. User Interfaces for Digital Libraries(II)
Collaboration-centric functionality .
DELOS puts effort towards the study of annotations
Objective
To develop comprehensive annotation models and building compliant systems that will permit users to add their personal opinion, thoughts, and memories to the global Digital Libraries and retrieve those of others.

18. Information Personalization
Problem:
To adapt system behaviour to diverse user characteristics
Emphasis on
establishing the appropriate foundations for modeling user preferences and more general user context and then using the resulting models to personalize user interactions

19. Curation and Preservation
Issue:
Need for long-term preservation of Digital Library material
Relevant DELOS work on:
Integrating preservation functionality into the overall Digital Library system design
Developing techniques for automating the process of selection and ingest of materials into a preservation repository

20. Digital Repositories A new strategy in the scholarly communication
A set of services that an institution offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution members
Emphasis on
Access policy (open access)
Operational environment
Digital repository infrastructures

21. Evaluation
Issue:
Digital Libraries need to be evaluated as systems and as services to determine how useful, usable, and economic they are
Relevant DELOS work on:
Development of a comprehensive theoretical framework for DL evaluation
New evaluation methodologies
Development of toolkits and testbeds in order to enable new evaluations

22. Evaluation (II) Digital Library Evaluation Infrastructures:
Cross-Language Retrieval
Digital Libraries contain information in many different languages. Effective access to this information, through interfaces that are equally varied linguistically, is critical to making Digital Libraries widely accepted
The Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) is the main international infrastructure and evaluation framework for cross-language information retrieval

23. Evaluation (III) Digital Library Evaluation Infrastructures:
XML Information Access
The “Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Document Access and Retrieval” (INEX) is an infrastructure and evaluation framework dealing with the performance of systems and services that provides access to XML-based Digital Libraries

24. Dissemination DELOS Digital Library DELOS Web site DELOS Newsletter
Research Exchange Programme
DELOS International Summer School
Brainstorming Workshops
Thematic Workshops

25. DELOS Main Achievements
Generation of a set of comprehensive surveys and state-of-the-art reports covering the research areas of the Network
Development of demonstrators related to the research objectives of the Network.
Theoretical work related to the development of models related to the research activities of the Network.
Development of infrastructures to support large evaluation campaigns in the field of cross-language retrieval and XML retrieval