Payette, S.; Blanchi, C.; Lagoze, C.; Overly, E.A.: Interoperability for digital objects and repositories : the Cornell/CNRI experiments (1999)
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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.
