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 Issue 2 : October 2004 |
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Following the closing session of the 8th European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL 2004), delegates met at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom for an information day on the DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries [1]. The DELOS Network is a project funded by the European Commission under the Information Society Technologies (IST) priority [2] of the European Union's Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) [3].
Delegates were welcomed by Vittore Casarosa of the Institute of Information Science and Technologies of the Italian National Research Council (CNR-ISTI) and leader of the DELOS Network's dissemination effort. The first presenter was Claude Poliart, the project officer from the European Commission, who noted the growing importance of the information society in the twenty-first century. His expectation was that the DELOS network would become a catalyst for uniting the global digital library community as well as a forum to exchange good practice and different perspectives. He predicted that the socio-economic impact of DELOS and other digital library programmes would increase over the next decades.
Costantino Thanos of CNR-ISTI, the scientific co-ordinator of the DELOS network, then gave a brief overview of the project's organisation, objectives and joint programme of activities. Its main objective was to define a joint programme of activities for next-generation European digital library research. The project is organised into thematic clusters, each with its own co-ordinator.
Thanos was followed by a report by Yannis Ioannidis of the University of Athens of a DELOS brainstorming meeting held in Corvara, Italy on the 8-9 July 2004. The meeting had concerned the future of digital libraries and its primary goal was to develop a research agenda. It first divided into parallel sessions of three competing research agendas, each group reporting back its findings which at a level of abstraction all showed some commonality. There were 25 invited participants, who all presented their own vision of digital libraries. The main conclusions were that digital libraries had to become more user-centred, that digital libraries should not just be passive repositories but required more active collaboration and communication tools, and that there was a need for more generic digital library management systems. It was felt that in the future no one should be building from scratch; instead the generic digital library management systems should provide a basis for the specialised modules required for each system. There was also a feeling that the term 'digital libraries' did not really reflect the subject as it has now developed [4]. Specific recommendations included the need for reference models with defined roles and for digital libraries to be integrated into larger environments, e.g. health, science, government, learning, etc. Research was required in two separate areas. Firstly, user-centred research, taking into account the different roles users play, the need for good interfaces, personalisation, etc. Secondly, research was needed into the system layer, the bits and bytes of digital information, middleware, generic and pragmatic semantics. From this was developed a list of research topics. This reflected what Costantino referred to as the two layers of a conceptual framework.
Figure 1: Conceptual Framework for Research
Finally, the brainstorming meeting investigated the possibility of developing a phrase that could be used instead of 'digital libraries.' Combinations of various terms were considered, including the adjectives 'pervasive,' 'ambient' or 'collaborative' and the entities 'garden,' 'factory' and 'architecture,' but the phase 'dynamic ubiquitous knowledge environments' was said to be the favoured choice of the meeting.
The information day then turned to a more detailed description of each DELOS cluster, all of which addressed their objectives and task plans, while highlighting progress to date.
First, Seamus Ross of the University of Glasgow (UK) introduced the challenges being addressed by the preservation cluster (WP6) and some of its current activities. These included the authenticity and reliability of digital objects, their ingest and retrieval, and technology obsolescence. Other problems related to the identification of adequate preservation metadata, and the legal and organisational contexts of preservation. In thinking about cluster activities for the next phase of the DELOS network, Ross talked about the re-engineering of processes and technologies, including ingest and appraisal. Current cluster activities included work on the development of a digital preservation testbed environment, the design and deployment of digital repositories, file formats and the representation and documentation of function and behaviour. Ross noted the urgent need to integrate preservation requirements with digital library design. He concluded by announcing that there would be a DELOS summer school on digital preservation in the south of France over 5-11 June 2005.
Sören Balko of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich (Switzerland) then introduced the work of the cluster on digital library architectures (WP1). The objectives of the cluster were to evaluate peer-to-peer, grid middleware and service oriented architecture. Progress to date had included the creation of a cluster Web site [5] and a thematic workshop held in Cagliari, Sardinia in June 2004. Other planned work would include a survey and comparison of the service architecture, peer-to-peer and Grid approaches to digital libraries. The proceedings of the Cagliari workshop had already been published on the cluster Web site and negotiations were underway with a publisher for a book on current trends in digital library architectures. Other future activities include a joint cluster workshop with WP2, to be held in Dagstuhl, Germany over 29 March - 1 April 2005.
Yannis Ioannidis then returned to speak about the cluster on information access and personalisation (WP2). The objectives of the cluster had been further informed by the Corvara meeting, but key topics included access and integration and generic, user-centred approaches to personalisation. The cluster is also co-operating with the architecture clusters on the Dagstuhl workshop, and was planning a further workshop to be held in Greece. Surveys had already started on access and interaction models and metadata. Other surveys would cover integration and interaction management schemes, integrated metadata, data provenance, and personalisation. The cluster had also collaborated with WP4 on the DELOS summer school on 'User-centred design of digital libraries', held in Pisa, Italy over 6-10 September 2004.
Stavros Christodoulakis of the Technical University of Crete (Greece) introduced the work of the cluster on audiovisual and non-traditional objects (WP3). The cluster had initiated research activities on the lifecycle of non-traditional and audiovisual objects, including capture, analysis, metadata extraction, normalisation, management, semantic interaction, retrieval languages and algorithms. Christodoulakis said that there was a need to develop common foundations, e.g. on metadata capture and automatic annotation, universal access, management of multimedia, semantic retrieval, models of segmentation and summarisation. He was of the view that all the issues mentioned could not be viewed in isolation and that advanced applications such as eScience and eLearning would also be relevant to the cluster's work, as well as the issue of interoperability between repositories. An internal workshop was planned for Crete in November 2004 and a joint cluster workshop with WP4 in Cortona, Italy, May 2005. The cluster was also preparing state-of-the-art reports on metadata extraction, content-based retrieval, interaction, and data management.
After a short break, Tiziana Catarci of the University of Rome 'La Sapienza' (Italy) spoke about the activities being undertaken by the cluster on user interfaces and visualisation (WP4). The cluster was mainly addressing the subject of user needs, specifically how to collect and analyse user requirements from end users and other stakeholders. Work was also being undertaken on a theoretical framework for the design of new interfaces, the contexts digital library lifecycles, functional and non-functional requirements, visualisation and standards for usability and accessibility. Initial deliverables had included the cluster Web site [6] and a draft report on functional and non-functional requirements for digital libraries. Planned future events include a workshop on audiovisual content and visualisation to be held in Cortona on the 4-6 May 2005 and a special session on accessing digital libraries at the International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCII 2005), to be held in Las Vegas, USA over 22-27 July 2005.
Liz Lyon of UKOLN (UK) introduced the cluster on knowledge extraction and semantic interoperability (WP5) by highlighting aspects of the constantly evolving landscape of the cluster. Examples were recent reports recommending the deployment of institutional repositories, the need for knowledge extraction in data-intensive e-science contexts, and the growing importance of the Semantic Web. WP5 had a major focus on fostering integration and there had been an emphasis on inviting interested non-funded partners to join the cluster. There was also an awareness of the need to integrate with other DELOS clusters, e.g. with WP6 on repositories. The cluster was already undertaking a survey of semantic interoperability and a workshop on this topic was planned for the following day in Bath.
Claus-Peter Klas of the University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany) then introduced the work of the cluster on evaluation (WP7). He started by stressing the importance of communication between evaluation experts and digital library researchers. An evaluation forum had been set up to facilitate this communication [7] and a workshop was planned for 4-5 October 2004 in Padova, Italy, to which selected external experts had been invited. The cluster was also involved in two major evaluation activities. First, the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval (INEX), which is testing the retrieval effectiveness, efficiency and usability of XML documents based on a corpus of 12,000 articles from IEEE Computer Society publications. INEX 2004 [8] currently had 57 participants and a workshop was planned for Dagstuhl in December 2004. Secondly, the cluster was involved in the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF), which is concerned with the evaluation of multilingual retrieval systems [9]. It was noted that the CLEF 2004 workshop was simultaneously taking place in a neighbouring building at the University of Bath [10].
Vittore Casarosa then introduced the dissemination and spreading of excellence cluster (WP8). He started by noting that FP6 placed more emphasis on integration and that dissemination could be used to support this. Cluster activities included a network Web site (later to become a portal) and an electronic newsletter that focuses on cluster activities. Past and future events include cross-cluster thematic workshops (e.g., Padova, Dagstuhl and Cortona), workshops hosted with other user communities (e.g. ICA Congress 2004, FIAT-IFTA), regular brainstorming meetings (e.g., Corvara), and national awareness events (e.g. those held in Rome and Lund, June 2004). There had been a recent summer school on user-centred design (Pisa, September 2004) with another on preservation planned for next year (June 2005). Casarosa concluded by noting that there would be a call for proposals to host future ECDL conferences (from 2006) and that DELOS had funding available for a researcher exchange programme (requests to be sent to the cluster co-ordinators) where the host organisation was a DELOS member.
My thanks to Manjula Patel and Richard Waller of UKOLN for their assistance in the compilation of this report.
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