This working group focuses on technical issues associated with repository interoperation. As digital libraries proliferate, many approaches to managing digital assets and associated meta-data are emerging. There are important differences among these approaches, and these differences have technical, legal, social, economic, and political dimensions. How can multiple repositories coexist and interact effectively?
The working group is motivated by several important trends: The complexity and semantic richness of objects and meta-data managed by repositories is increasing. Information objects of greater value are now being managed more routinely, raising issues of security, access control, and support for commerce. Performance demands are increasing, as is the quantity and size of information objects, particularly in multimedia applications. Digital libraries are interacting more often with personal, group, and wide area information services. Finally, the distinction is blurring between digital libraries and other institutional information resources such as databases and corporate webs.
The starting points for the working group are technologies that support management of information objects, their names, and associated meta-data-databases, distributed file systems, object bases, and the Web. Several digital library research groups have started to develop concepts that could provide a basis for repository interoperation, including the CS-TR architectural work of Kahn and Wilensky, the Stanford Infobus project of Garcia-Molina and Winograd, and the agent architecture of the Michigan DLI project. In addition to the need to reconcile these various approaches, there is a broader need to put them in the context of standards efforts in the wider community, including Web-associated standards, CORBA, OLE, z39.50, and SQL and its successors. All of these deal with resolving names to objects, and all deal in some measure with meta-data.
The initial effort of the working group is (1) to identify the dimensions of the space of repository interaction and interoperability, and the issues associated with achieving some transparency for users of the digital libraries, and (2) to assess current research and development efforts to understand the differences among them.
wya/reb-a
Last revised: February 5, 1996