DRIVERing Research Infrastructures

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DRIV(ER)ing Research Infrastructures

• Yannis Ioannidis
• University of Athens, Hellas

1st DRIVER Summit Towards a Confederation of
Digital Repositories, 16-17/1/2008, Göttingen
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DRIVER

• Digital
• Repository
• Infrastructure
• Vision for
• European
• Research

? Research
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Imperatives

• Comprehensive, global access to any type of
  scientific information
• Minimum time and resources effort to access and
  use this information
• Easy search/navigation, handling, manipulation,
  and re-dissemination of information
• Maximum visibility to and communication with the
  research community, research impact
• Long-term access and preservation of research
  results

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High-Level Objectives

• Develop an environment for integrating existing
  national, regional, or thematic repositories
• Create a production-quality European DR
  infrastructure
• Prepare the future expansion and upgrade of the
  DR infrastructure across Europe
• Identify and promote the use of a relevant set of
  standards
• Raise awareness among user communities

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Challenges

• Create a
• European
• Repository
• Infrastructure

Large number of providers and users
Emphasis on content and services
Hosting hardware and software
Multifaceted endeavor technology, organization
Operational infrastructure, open for
experimentations
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Past-Present-Future
National, Regional, and Thematic DRs
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Repository Systems effortsIndividual institution
site

• Centralized System
• High installation and maintenance cost for
  hardware and software
• Poor limited scalability
• Reuse by data and service duplication!

UI
Functionality resources
Search

Index
Index
Information Space
Content resources
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Repository Systems effortsMultiple institution
sites

• Repeated efforts
• High installation and maintenance cost for
  hardware and software
• Poor limited scalability
• Reuse by data and service duplication!
• Disconnected repositories

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Repository Systems effortsSharing and reusing
content

• Centralized System
• High installation and maintenance cost for
  hardware and software
• Poor limited scalability
• Reuse by data duplication!

Functionality resources
UI
Search

Index
Index
Information Space
OAI-PMH
Aggregator
OAI-PMH
OAI-PMH
OAI-PMH

Content resources
Institution Site
Institution Site
Institution Site
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Repository Systems effortsSharing and reusing
content

• Repeated efforts
• High installation and maintenance cost for
  hardware and software
• Poor limited scalability
• Reuse by data and service duplication!
• Disconnected repositories
• Sometimes desired policy
• Often undesirable

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DRIVER Infrastructure Vision
Moving from
building individual repositories or repository
clusters,
one at a time, repeating things again and again,
to building
a generating engine,
a warehouse,
an INFRASTRUCTURE,
facilitating the above by offering appropriate
generic, reusable services
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DRIVER Infrastructure Vision

• Build and maintain
• a sustainable European environment
• where content and functionality resources
• can be openly shared and integrated
• for use by any application or community

• Sustainability
• Maintainability
• Scalability
• Reusability

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DRIVER Infrastructure
Enabling Services
Functionality Services
UI
UI
Search
Search

Index
Index
Index
Store
Content/Data Services
Aggregator
Aggregator
Content Resources
OAI-PMH
OAI-PMH
OAI-PMH
OAI-PMH


Institution Site
Institution Site
Institution Site
Institution Site
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Technological features

• Fully flexible and dynamic
• Repositories
• Users
• Communities
• Services
• Fully distributed System
• Services are implemented as Web Services
• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
• Advantages
• Scalability both on the data provided or the
  usage/load
• Extensibility of functionalities is easily
  accomplished

System Resources
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Enabling Services

• Infrastructure management and service/resource
  gluing handles all the nitty-gritty generic
  tasks (like an operating system)
• Knowledge of all DRIVER Resources
• Monitoring and coordination of Service
  interactions
• Provides Authorization Authentication
  mechanisms

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Content/Data Services

• Information Space Management
• Harvesting from external repositories
• Aggregating cleaning enriching
• Storage, indexing
• Virtualization of content collections
• OAI-Publishing of harvested data

Index
Index
Index
Store
Aggregator
Aggregator
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Functionality Services

• User-content based services
• User Interfaces
• Information (Content) Search Browse
• Personalized services
• User and Communities
• User Profiling
• User recommendations alerts

UI
UI
Search
Search
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New Repository Scenario
Functionality Services
UI
UI
Search
Search

Index
Index
Index
Content/Data Services
Store
Aggregator
Aggregator
Content Resources
OAI-PMH
OAI-PMH
OAI-PMH


Institution Site
Institution Site
Institution Site
Institution Site
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New Service Scenario
Functionality Services
UI
UI
Search
Search

Index
Index
Content/Data Services
Aggregator
Content Resources
OAI-PMH
OAI-PMH
OAI-PMH


Institution Site
Institution Site
Institution Site
Institution Site
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DRIVER European Information Space

• Services for the creation, maintenance, and
  access to the European Information Space

Functionality Layer
Repositories
Data Layer
Enabling Layer
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Data sharing Service reuse

• Belgium scenario
• Use European DRIVER infra
• Have a storage/Index for themselves
• Provide their (Belgian) data to Europe
• E-theses scenario
• Include European theses documents in overall
  infra
• Make these visible through virtual mechanisms
  (collections) for specialized searches
• India Scenario
• Deploy DRIVER infrastructure for all their
  repositories

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DRIVER infrastructure the benefits
Functionality Layer
Repositories
Data Layer
Enabling Layer
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Current DRIVER content
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Current DRIVER deployment
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Current state of production

• First TEST-BED released (v1.0)
• Enabling Layer Services deployed on DRIVER sites
  across Europe
• Data Layer now aggregating 70 Repositories from
  6 Countries (FR,BE,NL,DE,UK, IT)
• Functionality Layer delivering Search User
  Interface with special functionalities
  collections, recommendations, communities
• One running DIS DRIVER European Information
  Space counting 51 reps, for 250.000 Open Access
  docs

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Content Resources

• Focus on Institutional Repositories
• Rapid progress over the last years
• Inherent sustainability (e.g. libraries)
• Adequate technical homogeneity (OAI-PMH)
• Textual data
• Selection of IRs based on
• Maturity
• Policies
• Technologies used

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Content Sources

• Initially 51 institutional repositories
• 15 from the Netherlands (coordinated by DARE)
• 20 from the UK (coordinated by SHERPA)
• 14 from Germany (adhere to the German
  DINI-standard)
• 1 from France (CNRS)
• 1 from Belgium (UGent)
• Later raised to 70 and growing
• More repositories to be identified and included
• Joint policies and objectives
• Broad and multiple user groups
• Metadata, technical, and organisational standards

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Future issues

• Towards release v1.1
• Addition of new DISs sharing the European
  Information Space
• Belgium
• Ireland
• Electronic Theses and Dissertations
• India?
• more to come
• New content types, and compound
  documents/scientific objects
• New functionality services

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Simple Search Scenario
Index
IS
Search
RS
UI
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DRIVER portal
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DRIVER Activities
Content Organisation and Provision
Infrastructure Middleware Development/ Implementa
tion
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DRIVER Funding

• DRIVER project 18 months (6/06-11/07)
• An organization and a testbed system
• DRIVER2 project 24 months (12/07-11/09)
• A confederation and a production system
• Research on next-generation issues
• DRIVERn project
• Driver Confederation members
• Member states

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Summary
DRIVER drives Europe towards full unification
of its scientific information
www.driver-community.eu