Document sources are available everywhere, both within the internal networks of organizations and on the Internet. Even individual organizations use search engines from different vendors to index their internal document collections. These search engines are typically incompatible in that they support different query models and interfaces, they do not return enough information with the query results for adequate merging of the results, and finally, in that they do not export metadata about the collections that they index (e.g., to assist in resource discovery). This paper describes STARTS, an emerging protocol for Internet retrieval and search that facilitates the task of querying multiple document sources. STARTS has been developed in a unique way. It is not a standard, but a group effort coordinated by Stanford's Digital Library project, and involving over 11 companies and organizations. The objective of this paper is not only to give an overview of the STARTS protocol proposal, but...

In this paper we review studies of the growth of the Internet and technologies that are useful for information search and retrieval on the Web. We present data on the Internet from several different sources, e.g., current as well as projected number of users, hosts, and Web sites. Although numerical figures vary, overall trends cited

This document specifies a set of methods, headers, and content-types ancillary to HTTP/1.1 for the management of resource properties, creation and management of resource collections, namespace manipulation, and resource locking (collision avoidance). RFC 2518 WEBDAV February 1999 Goland, et al. Standards Track [Page 2] Contents Status of this Memo .................................................................................................................................. 1 Abstract ..................................................................................................................................................... 1 Contents..................................................................................................................................................... 2 1 Introduction .......................................................................................................................................... 6 2 Notational Conventions...............

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) develops and promotes interoperability solutions that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. The roots of the OAI lie in the E-Print community. Over the last year its focus has been extended to include all content providers. This paper describes the recent history of the OAI – its origins in promoting E-Prints, the broadening of its focus, the details of its technical standard for metadata harvesting, the applications of this standard, and future plans. Categories and Subject Descriptors

. The overall goal of the Stanford Digital Library project is to provide an infrastructure that affords interoperability among heterogeneous, autonomous digital library services. These services include both search services and remotely usable information processing facilities. In this paper, we survey and categorize the metadata required for a diverse set of Stanford Digital Library services that we have built. We then propose an extensible metadata architecture that meets these requirements. Our metadata architecture fits into our established infrastructure and promotes interoperability among existing and de-facto metadata standards. Several pieces of this architecture are implemented; others are under construction. The architecture includes attribute model proxies, attribute model translation services, metadata information facilities for search services, and local metadata repositories. In presenting and discussing the pieces of the architecture, we show how they address our motivati...

In this paper we present a new approach for building RDF schemas by integrating existing ontologies and structured vocabularies (thesauri). We will present a simple mechanism based on the specification of inclusion relationships between thesaurus terms and ontology concepts and show how these relationships can be exploited to create applicationspecific RDF schemas incorporating the structural views of ontologies and deep classification schemes provided by thesauri. 1

Metadata is of paramount importance for persons, organizations, and endeavors of every dimension that are increasingly turning to the World Wide Web (hereafter referred to as the Web) as a chief conduit for accessing

Abstract. An important problem for information access systems is that of organizing large sets of documents that have been retrieved in response to a query. Text categorization and text clustering are two natural language processing tasks whose results can be applied to document organization. This chapter describes user interfaces that use categories and clusters to organize retrieval results, and examines the relationship between the two. 1 1.

We describe the ABC modeling work of the Harmony Project. The ABC model provides a foundation for understanding interoperability of individual metadata modules -- as described in the Warwick Framework -- and for developing mechanisms to translate among them. Of particular interest in this model is an event, which facilitates understanding of the lifecycle of resources and the association of metadata descriptions with points in this lifecycle. 1. Metadata Modularity and Interoperability The Warwick Framework [22] describes the concept of modular metadata - individual metadata packages created and maintained by separate communities of expertise. A fundamental motivation for this modularity is to scope individual metadata efforts and encourage them to avoid attempts at developing a universal vocabulary. Instead, individual metadata efforts should concentrate on classifying and expressing semantics tailored toward focused functional and community needs. Warwick Framework-like modularity underlies the design of the W3C's Resource Description Framework (RDF) [15, 23], which is a modeling framework for the integration of diverse application and community-specific metadata vocabularies. An outstanding challenge of such modularity is the interoperability of multiple metadata packages that may be associated with and across resources. Metadata packages are by nature not semantically distinct, but overlap and relate to each other in numerous ways. Achieving interoperability between these packages via one-to-one crosswalks [4] is useful, but this approach does not scale to the many metadata vocabularies that will continue to develop. A more scalable solution is to exploit the fact that many entities and relationships - for example, people, places, creations, organizations, events...

Digital libraries (DLs) are complex information systems and therefore demand formal foundations lest development e#orts diverge and interoperability su#ers. In this paper, we propose the fundamental abstractions of Streams, Structures, Spaces, Scenarios, and Societies (5S), which contribute to define digital libraries rigorously and usefully. Streams are sequences of abstract items used to describe static and dynamic content. Structures can be defined as labeled directed graphs, which impose organization. Spaces are sets of abstract items and operations on those sets that obey certain rules. Scenarios consist of sequences of events or actions that modify states of a computation in order to accomplish a functional requirement. Societies comprehend entities and the relationships between and among them. Together these abstractions relate and unify concepts, among others, of digital objects, metadata, collections, and services required to formalize and elucidate "digital libraries". The applicability, versatility and unifying power of the theory is demonstrated through its use in three distinct applications: building and interpretation of a DL taxonomy, analysis of case studies of digital libraries, and utilization as a formal basis for a DL description language. Keywords: digital libraries, theory, foundations, definitions, applications 1 1 Motivation Digital libraries are extremely complex information systems. The proper concept of a digital library seems hard to completely understand and evades definitional consensus. Di#erent views (e.g., historical, technological) and perspectives (e.g., from the library and information science, information retrieval, or human-computer interaction communities) have led to a myriad of di#ering definitions. Licklider, in his seminal ...