Digital Library Platform Research Articles

Federating Digital Library Services for Advanced Applications in Science and Education

Over the recent years numerous digital libraries have been deployed and enabled in the Internet with the use of various digital library frameworks. They contain valuable digital resources use of which is important to a large community of users, especially within the scientific and educational communities. The access to distributed digital resources has been a subject of research for a few years now. In this paper we present our own work in this area, discussing our approach at the distributed digital library platform that is widely used within the PIONIER optical network. We present the methodology for building distributed search and access to digital publications that allowed to create a national federation of digital libraries and that is now under investigation for possible use within various applica- tion fields including medicine, science and education.

Towards a multilingual, multimedia and multimodal digital library platform

The China-US Million Book Digital Library Project (Million Book Project) is an international cooperation program between China and the US. However, one million digitized books are considered not to be the ultimate goal of the project, but a first step towards universal access to human knowledge. In particular, there are four challenges about the new way to analyze, process, operate, visualize and interact with digital media resource in this library. To tackle these challenges, North China Centre of Million Book Project (in Chinese Academy of Sciences) has initiated several innovative research projects in areas such as multimedia content analysis and retrieval, bilingual services, multimodal information presentation, and knowledge-based or- ganization and services. In this keynote speech, we simply review our work in these areas, and argue that by technological co- operation with these innovation research topics, the project will develop a top-level digital library platform for the million book library.

HETEROGENEOUS DIGITAL LIBRARY QUERY PLATFORM USING A TRULY DISTRIBUTED MULTI-AGENT SEARCH

A platform for performing multi-agent searches in heterogeneous digital libraries is proposed. This differs significantly from previous approaches by completely removing the concept of a centralized search engine. Specifically, the organization of information held on domain index servers is constrained to conform to a virtual tree representation based on facets and global keyword concept schema particular to the set of information providers associated with the domain of interest (e.g. preparatory intranet). Simulation studies are used to compare this platform against a digital library platform presently in use, which employs the traditional central server scheme. Improvements in terms of query service time and robustness are demonstrated.