Alessia Bardi

The D-NET software toolkit

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present the architectural principles and the services of the D-NET software toolkit. D-NET is a framework where designers and developers find the tools for constructing and operating aggregative infrastructures (systems for aggregating data sources with heterogeneous data models and technologies) in a cost-effective way. Designers and developers can select from a variety of D-NET data management services, can configure them to handle data according to given data models, and can construct autonomic workflows to obtain personalized aggregative infrastructures. Design/methodology/approach – The paper provides a definition of aggregative infrastructures, sketching architecture, and components, as inspired by real-case examples. It then describes the limits of current solutions, which find their lacks in the realization and maintenance costs of such complex software. Finally, it proposes D-NET as an optimal solution for designers and developers willing to realize aggre...

Aggregative Data Infrastructures for the Cultural Heritage

Aggregative data infrastructures (ADIs) are information systems where organizations can find the tools to integrate their data sources to form uniform and richer information spaces of object metadata descriptions. Novel sustainable approaches for the realization of ADIs are based on the adoption of ADI enabling technologies which support the realization, maintenance and upgrade of ADIs and promote functionality re-use. The Cultural Heritage (CH) community is one of the most active in the realization of ADIs. Besides, the realization of ADIs for CH can be particularly complex when compared to other disciplines due to the possibly high heterogeneity of data sources involved. In this paper, we present the D-NET Software Toolkit as an ideal candidate for the realization of sustainable, extensible, scalable and dynamic ADIs for CH. To this aim we present the D-NET framework and services, and demonstrate its effectiveness in the CH scenario by describing its adoption to realize a real-case ADI for the project Heritage of the People’s Europe.

Coping with interoperability and sustainability in cultural heritage aggregative data infrastructures

The Cultural Heritage CH community is one of the most active in the realisation of Aggregative Data Infrastructures ADIs. ADIs provide tools to integrate data sources to form uniform and richer information spaces. The realisation of ADIs for CH must be based on technology capable of coping with complex interoperability issues and sustainability issues. In this paper, we present the D-NET software toolkit framework and services, devised for the realisation of sustainable and customisable ADIs. In particular, we demonstrate the effectiveness of D-NET in the CH scenario by describing its usage in the realisation of a real-case ADI for the EC project Heritage of the Peoples Europe HOPE. The HOPE ADI uses D-NET to implement a two-phase metadata conversion methodology that addresses data interoperability issues while facilitating sustainability by encouraging participation of data sources.

Data Interoperability and Curation: The European Film Gateway Experience

Film archives, containing collections of cinema-related digital material, have been created in many European countries. Today, the EC Best Practice Network Project EFG (European Film Gateway) provides a single access point to 59 collections from 19 archives and across 14 European countries, for a total of 640,000 digital objects. This paper illustrates challenges and solutions in the realization of the EFG data infrastructure. These mainly concerned the curation and interoperability issues derived by the need of aggregating metadata from heterogeneous archives (different data models, hence metadata schemas, and exchange formats). EFG designed a common data model for movie information, onto which archives data models can be optimally mapped. It realizes a data infrastructure based on the D-NET software toolkit, capable of dealing with data collection, mapping, cleaning, indexing, and access provision through web portals or standard access protocols. To achieve its objectives EFG has extended D-NET with advanced tools for data curation.

OAIzer: Configurable OAI Exports over Relational Databases

Modern Digital Library Systems (DLSs) typically support information spaces of interconnected objects, whose graph-like document models surpass the traditional DL payload-metadata document models. Examples are repositories for enhanced publications, CRIS systems, cultural heritage archives. To enable interoperability, DLSs expose their objects and interlinks with other objects as “export packages”, via standard exchange formats (e.g. XML, RDF encodings) and OAI-ORE or OAI-PMH protocols. This paper presents OAIzer, a tool for the easy configuration and automatic deploy of OAI interfaces over an RDBMSbased DLS. Starting from the given relational representation of a document model, OAIzer provides DLS developers with user interfaces for drafting the intended structure of export packages and the automated deploy of OAI endpoints capable of exporting such packages.

The European Project OpenUP: OPENing UP New Methods, Indicators and Tools for Peer Review, Impact Measurement and Dissemination of Research Results.

Open Access and Open Scholarship are substantially changing the way scholarly artefacts are evaluated, published and assessed, while the introduction of new technologies and media in scientific workflows has changed the “how and to whom” science is communicated, and how stakeholders interact with the scientific community. OpenUP addresses key aspects and challenges of the currently transforming science landscape. Its main objectives are to: (i) identify and determine new mechanisms, processes and tools for the peer-review of all types of research results (publications, data, software, processes, etc.); (ii) explore, identify and classify innovative dissemination mechanisms with an outreach aim towards businesses and industry, education, and society as a whole; (iii) analyse and identify a set of novel indicators that assess the impact of research results and correlate them to channels of dissemination.

The OpenAIRE Workflows for Data Management.

The OpenAIRE initiative is the point of reference for Open Access in Europe and aims at the creation of an e-Infrastructure for the free flow, access, sharing, and re-use of research outcomes, services and processes for the advancement of research and the dissemination of scientific knowledge. OpenAIRE makes openly accessible a rich Information Space Graph (ISG) where products of the research life-cycle (e.g. publications, datasets, projects) are semantically linked to each other. Such an information space graph is constructed by a set of autonomic (orchestrated) workflows operating in a regimen of continuous data integration. This paper discusses the principal workflows operated by the OpenAIRE technical infrastructure in its different functional areas and provides the reader with the extent of the several challenges faced and the solutions realized.

Realizing a Scalable and History-Aware Literature Broker Service for OpenAIRE

The OpenAIRE infrastructure is the point of reference for Open Science in Europe. Its services populate and provide access to a graph of objects relative to publications, datasets, people, organizations, projects, and funders aggregated from a variety of data sources, such as institutional repositories, data archives, journals, and CRIS systems. Not only, objects in the graph are harmonized to achieve semantic homogeneity, de-duplicated and merged, and enriched by inference with missing properties and/or relationships. The OpenAIRE Literature Broker Service is designed to offer subscription and notification functionalities for institutional repositories to: (i) learn about publication objects in OpenAIRE that do not appear in their collection but may be pertinent to it, and (ii) learn about extra properties or relationships relative to publication objects in their collection. Due to the high variability of the information space the following problems may arise: (i) subscriptions may vary over time to adapt to information space evolution, (ii) repository managers need to be able to quickly test their configurations before activating them, (iii) notifications may be redundant, and (iv) notifications may be very large over time. This paper presents the data model and software architecture of the OLBS, specifically designed to address these issues.

TagTick: a tool for annotation tagging over Solr indexes

“Annotation tagging” is an important curation action performed by authorized data curators willing to classify according to a common vocabulary an Information Space of potentially heterogeneous objects (e.g. not sharing common classification schemes). To carry out their activities, data curators need annotation tagging tools which allow them to bulk tag or untag large sets of objects in temporary work sessions, where they can experiment in real-time the effect of their actions before making the changes visible to end-users. Real-time temporary bulk tagging is a non trivial feature to implement, which strictly depends on the back-end used to index the Information Space. This demo presents TagTick, a tool which offers to data curators a fully functional annotation tagging environment over full-text index Apache Solr, considered a “de facto standard” in the field.