Info Grid 2005 - Tuesday 27th, 09:45 - Rebuilding Information Services for the Digital Age

9:45
Rebuilding Information Services for the Digital Age
Norbert Lossau
Bielefeld University, Germany

Presentation: ppt (2.9M); pdf (3.4M);

what does the information environment look like for implementing SOA

Key questions
1. How do SOA-based activities relate to our existing information environment?
2. "Collaboration between different communities is needed" - but how do we organize this collaboration?

Information services provided by libraries
* search
* access
* re-use
* communication/dissemination/publishing

New developments
- grid (mainly middleware)
- e-science

End-users demands grow and differentiate
* researches etc. creating compound, live documents, changing nature of knowledge generation
* more advanced searching and browsing e.g. integrate search into desktop tools
* better access to more things - in an interdisciplinary environment, people need access to more information
* re-use
* communication/dissemination/publishing

A Conclusion

* Libraries cannot possibly cover all these demands

The need for rebuilding information services

* We already have too many systems with partly overlapping functionalities, often not interoperating with each other

- leads to confusion on end-user side
- leads to inefficient deployment of staff and financial resources

SOA opens up new ways to *re-use* information services and promises *interoperability* between heterogenous systems and [something I didn't get]

[diagram of service modules of Digital Library NRC at Bielefeld University]

the system is a set of services

they are working on replacing existing metasearch service with BASE/Google Scholar/Scirus/ ...

build on state-of-the-art technology - IF it's possible to integrate them

Potential

* opens up unrealized opportunities for collaboration

... joint rebuilding of information services based on SOA?

SOA is an opportunity to restructure how we work together.

no explicit SOA activities in the German library world

http://www.dl-forum.de/

* in the German library world, SOA mainly understood as Web Services, implementations have only been slowly progressing

There have been digital library developments, however.

http://rzblxl.uni-regensburg.de/ezeit/?lang=en

http://elib.uni-stuttgart.de/opus/doku/english/index_english.php

http://www.redi-bw.de/

BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine)
http://www.base-search.net/
* based on FAST data search
* Web Service interface is planned

http://www.hbz-nrw.de/produkte_dienstl/DigiBib/
* internal Web Services
* external Web Services planned

Digital Peer Publishing (DIPP)
http://www.dipp.nrw.de/
* Publishing workflow and online publication system for OA journals
* Tech: Fedora, Plone, GAP - internal SOA, no external Web Services

Outside the German library world, there are more sophisticated technology developments, Java based.

development of Lucene for metasearch - L3S, Hannover
http://www.l3s.de/english/news/about_the_L3S.html

eSciDoc
http://www.escidoc-project.de/startseite.html
- buidling an integrated information, communication and publication platform for network based scholarly work based on Max Planck Society
- SOA architecture using Web Services
- scholarly workbench, publication management, etc.

Outlook: can we build inventories of information services - "yellow pages"
- regional, national, international

Requirements:
* create business models
* define basic standards
* provide support and maintenance

In this environment, how do we define a *product* that we deliver, and how do we measure the success of the product?

Define success:
1. service developed?
2. service developed and running in production?
3. service developed, and used and re-used in production at many different organizations?
4. #3 plus wide acceptance by many users?

Q: what could we do to help services move into real production?
A: we have a development department (in the research community) but no sales and marketing
also we need to find support for infrastructure to run and provide these services

Would like to see the Knowledge Exchange Office to bring together different communities.

Q: who should define service descriptions in a "yellow pages"
A: it's a question of finding a common understanding