Digital Library Research at ICS-FORTH
by Jakka Sairamesh, Sarantos Kapidakis and Christos Nikolaou
ICS-FORTH is currently involved in R&D activities regarding the
archi-tecture (system design and implementation) and economics of Digital
Libraries. We are a part of the ERCIM Digital Libraries initiative called
SAMOS, which is a G7 attested project. The SAMOS project aims at the development
of a networked computer science technical report library in Europe. A digital
library architecture will provide Internet access to a distributed, decentralised
multi-format collection of documents and a multilingual interface. The SAMOS
system will support a distributed digital library by storing and providing
access to technical reports from the ERCIM labs.
The SAMOS system will be an open system. This means that other European
institutions (university computer science departments, research organizations,
industrial R & D departments) could be connected to SAMOS and have access
to a large number of European technical report collections. Furthermore,
a study concerning the connection of SAMOS with the DIENST system - developed
in Cornell University (NCSTRL project), USA - is being conducted. This connection
will allow querying from Europe collections of technical reports connected
with the Dienst system in the US, and vice versa.
Work at ICS-FORTH addresses various issues concerning the design and development
of large decentralized and auto-nomous Digital Library sys-tems. The primary
goal is to provide architectures for distributed searching and retrieval
based on QoS (quality of service) as preferred by users, and provide mechanisms
for efficient usage of resources, such as processing, I/O and memory in
the servers, and bandwidth and buffers in the networks. Novel performance-based
architectures are also being investigated for optimized retrieval and presentation
in large scale digital library systems. For example, users could have preferences
on QoS and cost in viewing multimedia objects, and the architecture provides
the required services.
Digital Libraries at ICS-FORTH are also being considered from an economic
perspective (electronic commerce) so as to understand copyright, payment
and legal issues related to information providers and Internet service providers.
The goal is to understand issues of accounting, billing and payment in a
commercial Internet environment. This leads to an investigation of usage
costs of resources p; such as storage, network bandwidth and server
processing - for retrieval and presentation of multimedia objects.
Currently, DIENST system services are being enhanced in several ways: performance
management, load balancing of requests, scalable indexing architectures
and QoS in searching and presentation. A testbed of 7 DIENST servers (shown
in the figure) are being used for experiments. Some of the ideas from the
experiments will be proposed for the operational DIENST system (NCSTRL project).
For example, the figure shows the load (requests per hour) on the Dienst
servers over half a day. Such performance metrics will be used for load
balancing user requests. Statistics from the operational network are currently
being gathered for better understanding of user queries and system behavior.
Research work is underway to develop a large scale digital library using
open standards such as OMG CORBA for promoting interoperability.
Number of requests (y axis) versus the elapsed time in hours (x axis)
to each of the 7 DIENST servers.
Please contact:
Christos Nikolaou - ICS-FORTH
Tel: +30 81 391676
E-mail: nikolau@ics.forth.gr
