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Abstract

For several years the Digital Library Research Group at Cornell University and the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) have been engaged in research focused on the design and development of infrastructures for open architecture, confederated digital libraries. The goal of this effort is to achieve interoperability and extensibility of digital library systems through the definition of key digital library services and their open interfaces, allowing flexible interaction of existing services and augmentation of the infrastructure with new services. Some aspects of this research have included the development and deployment of the Dienst software, the Handle System®, and the architecture of digital objects and repositories. In this paper, we describe the joint effort by Cornell and CNRI to prototype a rich and deployable architecture for interoperable digital objects and repositories. This effort has challenged us to move theories of interoperability closer to practice. The Cornell/CNRI collaboration builds on two existing projects focusing on the development of interoperable digital libraries. Details relating to the technology of these projects are described elsewhere. Both projects were strongly influenced by the fundamental abstractions of repositories and digital objects as articulated by Kahn and Wilensky in A Framework for Distributed Digital Object Services. Furthermore, both programs were influenced by the container architecture described in the Warwick Framework, and by the notions of distributed dynamic objects presented by Lagoze and Daniel in their Distributed Active Relationship work. With these common roots, one would expect that the CNRI and Cornell repositories would be at least theoretically interoperable. However, the actual test would be the extent to which our independently developed repositories were practically interoperable. This paper focuses on the definition of interoperability in the joint Cornell/CNRI work and the set of experiments conducted to formally test it. Our motivation for this work is the eventual deployment of formally tested reference implementations of the repository architecture for experimentation and development by fellow digital library researchers. In Section 2, we summarize the digital object and repository approach that was the focus of our interoperability experiments. In Section 3, we describe the set of experiments that progressively tested interoperability at increasing levels of functionality. In Section 4, we discuss general conclusions, and in Section 5, we give a preview of our future work, including our plans to evolve our experimentation to the point of defining a set of formal metrics for measuring interoperability for repositories and digital objects. This is still a work in progress that is expected to undergo additional refinements during its development.

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Abstract

Reality is messy. Individuals perceive or define objects differently. Objects may change over time, morphing into new versions of their former selves or into things altogether different. A book can give rise to a translation, derivation, or edition, and these resulting objects are related in complex ways to each other and to the people and contexts in which they were created or transformed. Providing a normalized view of such a messy reality is a precondition for managing information. From the first library catalogs, through Melvil Dewey's Decimal Classification system in the nineteenth century, to today's MARC encoding of AACR2 cataloging rules, libraries have epitomized the process of what David Levy calls "order making", whereby catalogers impose a veneer of regularity on the natural disorder of the artifacts they encounter. The pre-digital library within which the Catalog and its standards evolved was relatively self-contained and controlled. Creating and maintaining catalog records was, and still is, the task of professionals. Today's Web, in contrast, has brought together a diversity of information management communities, with a variety of order-making standards, into what Stuart Weibel has called the Internet Commons. The sheer scale of this context has motivated a search for new ways to describe and index information. Second-generation search engines such as Google can yield astonishingly good search results, while tools such as ResearchIndex for automatic citation indexing and techniques for inferring "Web communities" from constellations of hyperlinks promise even better methods for focusing queries on information from authoritative sources. Such "automated digital libraries," according to Bill Arms, promise to radically reduce the cost of managing information. Alongside the development of such automated methods, there is increasing interest in metadata as a means of imposing pre-defined order on Web content. While the size and changeability of the Web makes professional cataloging impractical, a minimal amount of information ordering, such as that represented by the Dublin Core (DC), may vastly improve the quality of an automatic index at low cost; indeed, recent work suggests that some types of simple description may be generated with little or no human intervention.