Marko Mikulicic

PACE: A General-Purpose Tool for Authority Control

Curating the records of an authority file is an activity as important as committing for many organizations, which have to rely on experts equipped with so-called authority control tools, capable of automatically supporting complex disambiguation workflows through user-friendly interfaces. This paper presents PACE, an open source authority control tool which offers user interfaces for (i) customizing the structure (ontology) of authority files, (ii) tune-up probabilistic disambiguation of authority files through a set of similarity functions for detecting record candidates for duplication and overload (iii) curate such authority files by applying record merges and splitting actions, and (iv) expose authority files to third-party consumers in several ways. PACE’s back-end is based on Cassandra’s “NOSQL”technology to offer (i) read-write performances that scale up linearly with the number of records and (ii) parallel and efficient (MapReduce-based) record sorting and matching algorithms.

The Data Model of the OpenAIRE Scientific Communication e-Infrastructure

The OpenAIREplus project aims to further develop and operate the OpenAIRE e-infrastructure, in order to provide a central entry point to Open Access and non-Open Access publications and datasets funded by the European Commission and National agencies. The infrastructure provides the services to populate, curate, and enrich an Information Space by collecting metadata descriptions relative to organizations, data sources, projects, funding programmes, persons, publications, and datasets. Stakeholders in the research process and scientific communication, such as researchers, funding agencies, organizations involved in projects, project coordinators, can here find the information to improve their research and statistics to measure the impact of Open Access and funding schemes over research. In this paper, we introduce the functional requirements to be satisfied and describe the OpenAIREplus data model entities and relationships required to represent information capable of meeting them.

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.

Connecting the local and the online in information management

With the popularity of social media sites, digital content is increasingly stored and managed online. At the same time, the desktop and local storage continues to provide a personal environment in which users perform their daily tasks. Thus, to accomplish their tasks, users need to continuously switch between local and remote resources and applications, often carrying the burden of coordinating and synchronizing these in a consistent way. In this demonstration, we describe a system, called ScholarLynk, that bridges the local and online worlds and allows users to manage both local and online resources in a uniform way and in collaboration with others.

Aggregative Digital Library Systems in the DRIVER Infrastructure

The world-wide diffusion of Institutional Repositories led to a growing demand for SDLSs (Aggregative Digital Library Systems). ADLSs provide research organizations with end-user applications over an extensive Information Space of metadata records, collected and aggregated from a pool of potentially heterogeneous repositories. Such Information Spaces are populated by means of software designed to harvest and normalize metadata records from OAI-PMH compatible repositories. ADLSs are characterized by considerable and sometime unbearable costs for the supporting organizations, due to the professional skills and hardware required for their realization and maintenance.

Sustainable Digital Library Systems over the DRIVER Repository Infrastructure

The DRIVER Infrastructure is an e-infrastructure providing an environment where organizations find the tools to aggregate heterogeneous content sources into uniform shared Information Spaces and then build and customize their Digital Library Systems to operate over them. In this paper, we shall show the benefits for organizations embracing the infrastructural approach by presenting the DRIVER infrastructure, its current status of maintenance, its participating organizations, and the first two systems built on top of its Information Space.