In this paper, a Web-based digital music library based on a threetier architecture is presented. The digital library's primary goal is to efficiently manage distributed mp3 file collections. The proposed methodology makes use of the metadata existing inside the ID3 tag of each mp3 file. Such information is extracted from the corresponding files and stored in separate, XML-based data structures, which are part of the overall distributed information retrieval module. The digital library's actual data is kept at the back-end in a distributed fashion. Communication between the layers of the digital library and the various architectural components that reside in the middle layer is facilitated through the employment of the XML standard.

Abstract. In this paper, we propose an architecture that enables interactive ranking and filtering of search results in a digital library by taking under consideration their importance. The importance of a document is measured according to its popularity among the users of the digital library. Further search results manipulation can be performed after the creation of the corresponding list from the search engine and preferably in a different context, without any interaction with the server. A prototype implementation is also presented that demonstrates the functionality of the proposed architecture.