Fabio Corubolo

Superimposed Information Architecture for Digital Libraries

A variety of software tools commonly used in research and industry allow a user to select (usually contiguous) segments of content to be annotated, referenced, or otherwise distinguished from a containing document. However, digital libraries (DLs) often curate only full documents, not these selected sub-documents. Thus, sub-documents in a DL may not have the full complement of metadata, and they may not be visible using DL browse and search facilities. We are interested in explicit representation of sub-documents in a DL environment. In this paper, we show how sub-documents may be represented and curated. We focus on the explicit representation of what we call a mark- an encapsulated address of a sub-document along with associated context. Our contributions are: a software architecture for representing marks as first-class objects together with regular documents in a DL; and an implementation of our architecture using existing software packages with modest enhancements. This approach provides new capabilities for the DL with minimal modification to tools and interfaces familiar to the DL user.

Evolving Persistent Archives and Digital Library Systems: Integrating iRODS, Cheshire3 and Multivalent

This paper describes work undertaken by Data Intensive Cyber Environments Center (DICE) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Liverpool on the development of an integrated preservation environment, which has been presented at the National Coordination Office for Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD), at the National Science Foundation, and at the European Commission. The underlying technology is based on the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS), which implements a policy-based approach to distributed data management. By differentiating between different phases of the data life cycle based upon the evolution of data management policies, the infrastructure can be tuned to support data publication, data sharing, data analysis and data preservation. It is possible to build generic data management infrastructure that can evolve to meet the management requirements of each user community, federal agency and academic research project. In order to manage the properties of the data collections, we have developed and integrated scalable digital library services that support the discovery of, and access to, material organized as a collection. The integrated preservation environment prototype implements specific technologies that are capable of managing a wide range of preservation requirements, from parsing of legacy document formats, to enforcement of preservation policies, to validation of trustworthiness assessment criteria. Each capability has been demonstrated and is instantiated in multiple instances, both in the United States as part of the DataNet Federation Consortium (DFC) and through multiple European projects, primarily the FP7 SHAMAN project.

An ontology supporting planning, analysis, and simulation of evolving digital ecosystems

Digital Ecosystems (DEs) are interwoven networks of Digital Objects (DOs), policies, processes, services and user communities, within constantly changing and interacting environments. Their complex grown structures can be difficult to maintain and it can be hard to foresee the impact of planned and unplanned change. The PERICLES EU FP7 project developed the Digital Ecosystem Model (DEM), an ontology to model those complex DEs for supporting their maintenance and preservation. It provides concepts to express dependencies, provenance and analysis. Planned or unplanned changes to a DE represented via the DEM can be simulated in advance to analyse and mitigate risks, and to assure the quality of the DE architecture. PERICLES developed the EcoBuilder tool to support scenario experts in modelling aspects of interests of their DEs with the DEM for further investigation and maintenance. The DEM can be extended by domain specific ontologies to support various use cases of different domains, e.g. the digital media and art domains for which specialised ontologies [10] are developed in PERICLES. This approach supports documentation of the entities and their environments not only for preservation purposes, but also for the management of environmental drift in a wider range of domains, such as the digital ecosystems of Internet of Things (IoT), which we used as example in this paper.

PERICLES – Digital Preservation through Management of Change in Evolving Ecosystems

Management of change is essential to ensure the long-term reusabilityof digital assets. Change can be brought about in many ways, includingthrough technological, user community and policy factors. ...