Large Scale Distributed Knowledge Infrastructures

Abstract

Many tend to believe that the current process of development of science is one of the best established and most traditional research procedures that has evolved over years to reach its current almost ultimate perfection. Well, think again. In recent years we are witnessing the beginning of a paradigm shift in the scientific research conduct process. The traditional oneman-show way of performing research, most common in the first half of the 20th century is slowly beginning to disappear in the more advanced disciplines. Instead, modern research is increasingly based on the concepts of massively distributed collaboration, resource sharing, open access to knowledge and achieves new qualities through, often interdisciplinary, compilation research and data reuse. The conversion is becoming possible due to the rapid Internet technologies development of the last decades, electronic communication proliferation but also due to the subtle and indirect influence of the open access culture, originating from the open source software development but popularised through the Internet, and the resulting transformation in the human perception of notions of progress and scholarly work. The European Commission recognizes the importance of open access in research and, in anticipation of the open access mandate for its future programmes, establishes an OpenAIRE open repositories structure to house its future funded research output. One of the key prerequisites to the eventual success of the transformation process is a broad access to knowledge and, consequently, the existence of adequate tools and technologies making this access possible and effective. The availability of such technologies, however, is still lagging behind. Due to the diversity of information they comprise, digital libraries are often considered to have become one of the major web services (Liaw & Huang, 2003). They are also assumed to be among the most complex and advanced forms of information systems, and interoperability across digital libraries is recognised as a substantial research challenge (Goncalves et al., 2004; Candela et al., 2007). Moreover, it is commonly expected that the today's library, archive and museum services will converge in the future digital content repositories (Marty, 2008). Most of the current research activities in this area relate to metadata object description, inter-object relations (semantic similarity, citation references, near-duplicates identification, classification), text and data mining and automated content processing, user personalisation and community services, and large-scale distributed architectures and infrastructure interoperability and performance. In this chapter, we will