EU-NSF Working Group on Resource Indexing and Discovery in a Globally
Distributed Digital Library
by Carl Lagoze
The first of two meetings of the Resource Indexing and Discovery
in a Globally Distributed Digital Library Working Group was held 3-5 November
1997, at SZTAKI (the Computer and Automation Research Institute at the
Hungarian Academy of Science) in Budapest, Hungary. The focus of the Resource
Indexing and Discovery Working Group is the set of problems associated
with finding resources ('documents') in a globally distributed information
infrastructure.
Like the other groups, this group is comprised of five European members
and five U.S. participants. The European participants are Norbert Fuhr
(University of Dortmund, Germany), Sarantos Kapidakis (FORTH, Greece),
László Kovács (SZTAKI, Hungary), Michael Papazoglou
(Tilburg University, Netherlands), and Alan Smeaton (Dublin City University,
Ireland). The U.S. participants are William Y. Arms (CNRI), C. Mic Bowman
(TransArc Corporation), Luis Gravano (Columbia University), Carl Lagoze
(Cornell University), and Ralph Levan (OCLC).
The two and one-half days of the workshop were divided into four sections.
During the first day, participants presented and fielded questions on
position papers that they had prepared prior to the meeting. This process
served as both a means of introducing participants to each other and as
a vehicle for exposing the diversity of thinking on the resource discovery
subject. The focus of the position papers ranged from theoretical information
retrieval issues, to distributed digital library architecture, to metadata
issues, to visions of how the nature of the discoverable resources might
change in future digital libraries.
Following this position paper presentation, the meeting moved on to
review existing research in the area. An initial bibliography was developed
prior to the workshop and participants were asked to review specific papers
to determine whether they should remain on the bibliography. The discussion
of these papers presented the opportunity to discuss other possible sources
and add them to the bibliography. The eventual goal is to include a selected
bibliography of the state-of-the-art of research in the resource discovery
area in the final report of the working group.
After establishing this basis of awareness of the interests of group
members and the state-of-the-art of the research, the meeting moved to
the first stage of fulfilling the goal of the working group a detailed
enumeration of the essential research issues in the research discovery
area. The process began with a brainstorming session during which components
of the problem were offered. After producing a list of thirty-nine components,
the group then made a complete pass through the list to establish relationships,
or groupings, of elements of the list. The goal is to eventually develop
five or six broad categories of problem components that can serve as the
structural basis for the group final report.
In the final day of the meeting, the group took a more visionary approach.
There was a general feeling that, while the discussion up to that time
had been very useful, the group was being too myopic in its perspective.
Using the brainstorming process again, the group developed a list of predicted
technological changes that will impact resource discovery in the next ten
years. This process was especially effective because it allowed the members
to reflect on the list of research issues developed in the previous day
and note which of those might be resolved simply through changes in connectivity,
computing power, or software advances.
The next meeting of the group will take place 26-27 February 1998 in
Washington D.C. In the break between the two meetings, members agreed to
each 'adopt' elements of the research components list and vision list and
individually flesh them out, in preparation for the February meeting.
The public web page of the working group is at http://www2.cs.cornell.edu/lagoze/NSF-EU/public.htm.
Please contact either of the WG coordinators:
Norbert Fuhr - University of Dortmund
E-mail: fuhr@charly.informatik.uni-dortmund.de
Carl Lagoze - Cornell University
E-mail: lagoze@cs.cornell.edu
