Donatella Castelli

DILIGENT: integrating digital library and Grid technologies for a new Earth observation research infrastructure

This paper introduces DILIGENT, a digital library infrastructure built by integrating digital library and Grid technologies and resources. This infrastructure allows different communities to dynamically build specialised digital libraries capable to support the entire e-Science knowledge production and consumption life-cycle by using shared computing, storage, content, and application resources. The paper presents some of the main software services that implement the DILIGENT system. Moreover, it exemplifies the provided features by presenting how the DILIGENT infrastructure is being exploited in supporting the activity of user communities working in the Earth Science Environmental sector.

DILIGENT: a digital library infrastructure for supporting joint research

Through the handling of new type of documents digital libraries have the potential to revolutionize the way in which joint research is conducted. In order to make this possible, digital library systems based on new technologies must be introduced. This paper briefly introduces DILIGENT, a digital library system that is being developed by integrating digital library and grid technologies, and it discusses the new types of documents that it is able to support through the merge of these technologies.

On Digital Library foundations

Ever since their inception, Digital Library systems have had a very challenging objective: to provide organized content spaces and a suite of services that maximize synergies between content providers and content consumers, and boost the whole knowledge production lifecycle. Pressing and rapidly growing demand for powerful Digital Libraries has pushed the field to follow a pragmatic approach and to develop a plethora of diverse systems by borrowing and mixing models, technologies, and methodologies from different disciplines, e.g., Library Science, Information Retrieval, Databases, and Human-Computer Interaction. As a result, during the first 20 years of the life of the Digital Libraries field, many systems have been developed on a relatively ad hoc basis, while little attention has been paid to establishing common foundations for the field [5,12,13].

On research data publishing

Data publishing is a practice where data are made public so that they can be reused by others, in accordance with associated policies, while guaranteeing that data provenance and attribution are tracked. There is not yet a general agreement on the importance of, and on the solutions for, data publishing [8–10]. While in some communities it has already solidified into codified policies, procedures and workflows, in others its motivations and realization shapes are still controversial [3]. In the reality, it is a multifaceted process that can occur at different stages of the scientific process, involves different levels of openness and controlled sharing and concerns data products at various levels of manipulation and maturity. There are two major schools of thought governing the approaches supporting data publishing, those aiming at exploiting scholarly communication practices (e.g., data journals [4]) and those proposing services and infrastructures for the dissemination of these artefacts (e.g., data reposito-