Michele Artini

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...

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.

Keeping your aggregative infrastructure under control

“Aggregative Data Infrastructures” (ADIs) are systems devised to collect metadata descriptions (and files) from several data sources to construct uniform Information Spaces, hence providing cross-data source access via standard APIs or custom portals. ADIs typically deal with data collection workflows from arbitrary numbers of data sources, with heterogeneous access protocols, data exchange formats, and data models. Besides, they handle data processing work-flows for the harmonization and enrichment of aggregated metadata. Correct workflow management is crucial to ensure Information Space consistency, but is in general hard to sustain. This demo will present the solution offered in the context of the OpenAIRE infrastructure, which today collects metadata and files from around 450+ data sources (and growing) of several typologies. The D-NET Workflow Management Suite user interfaces support data curators at orchestrating overtime and in a sustainable way the configuration, execution, and monitoring of data collection and processing workflows for thousands of data sources.

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.

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.