DELOS Highlights COSTANTINO THANOS ITALIAN NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL

DELOS: A Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries Funded by the European Commission within the Sixth Framework Programme Duration: 48 Months (2004 - 2007) No. Members: 55 Funding: 6 Meuros www.Delos.info

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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