CYCLADES IST CYCLADES: A Personalised Collaborative Digital Library Environment Umberto Straccia I.S.T.I. - C.N.R. Pisa (ITALY)

CYCLADES IST Typical Digital Libraries (DLs) provide a search service to the web community at large. That means: –they rarely provide any personalized support –they do not learn the long-term preferences of a specific user Usually users access a DL in search of some information and may have overlapping interests if the information available in a DL matches their expectations, backgrounds, or motivations Very seldom, a DL is considered as collaborative meeting or working places, where users with common interests might well profit from each other We envisage a Digital Library not only as an information search resource, but also as a collaborative working and meeting space Preface

CYCLADES IST We will present a personalized collaborative Digital Library environment, where –users may organise the information space according to their own subjective view –may become aware of each other –exchange information and knowledge with each other –sharing opinions –may build communities –may get recommendations based on preference patterns of the users

CYCLADES IST CYCLADES EU funded project about E Finishes end of July, 2003 Objective: Development of a system which provides a personalised collaborative DL environment This environment will support –Users –Communities (and their members) –Projects (and their members) with functionality for advanced –Search in large, heterogeneous, multidisciplinary digital archives –Personalised Information Space Organisation –Collaboration, Filtering and Recommendation

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The Digital Archives of Cyclades CYCLADES will provide access to the Digital Archives compliant with the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) –CYCLADES will harvest and index records from OAI archives –CYCLADES may also harvest and index text files from other sources FOR MORE INFO...

CYCLADES IST OAI: main functionality List Metadata Identifiers (constraints: from, until, metadata format) List Metadata Records (constraints: from, until, metadata format) Get Metadata Record (constraints: identifier, metadata format)

CYCLADES IST OAI: Get Record Example ARCHIVE: BioMed Central –Archive details : Publisher of journals covering all areas of biology and medicine. ifier=oai:bmc:

CYCLADES IST … <dc xmlns=" xmlns:xsi=" xsi:schemaLocation=" A genomic timescale for the origin of eukaryotes S Blair Hedges Hsiong Chen … Abstract Background Genomic sequence analyses have shown that horizontal gene transfer occurred during the origin of eukaryotes as a consequence of symbiosis. However, details of the timing and number of symbiotic events are unclear. A timescale for the early.… …

CYCLADES IST Our collaborative environment is based on the folder paradigm users and communities of users may organise the information space into their own folder hierarchy folder becomes a holder of information items, which are usually semantically related and, thus, implicitly determines what the folder's topic is about

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Users may perform a set of actions, depending whether they are members of a community or not At any time, users perform their actions with respect to the current folder The functionality can be classified into five groups: folder management collection management collaborative support search recommendation Functionality

CYCLADES IST Include –create, edit, delete –new collections may be defined in terms of others, using meet, join and refinement operators –define the access policies of collections Collection management

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Collaboration between users is supported through the possibility of sharing community folders along with their contents and folder structure Discussion forums may be created within folders to allow informal exchange information Rating and annotation of data items also may take the form of discussions among the members of a community Mutual awareness may be supported through event icons (a kind of data item) displayed in the environment Activity reports that are daily received by may also be possible. Also, users may view the list of all existing communities so that they become aware of ongoing community activity Collaborative support

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Ad-hoc search: relevant data items are searched –within a set of user specified folders, she has access to –within a specified list of collections, she has access to Filtered search: this is like to the usual ad-hoc search, except that the user specifies a query and a folder, and the action of the system will be to look for data items relevant both to the query and to the folder (i.e., folder profile) Search

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A user may get recommendations of –data items –collections –users –communities The recommendations issued are based on –other users' (implicit or explicit) ratings –the similarity between the interests of the user, as represented by a given folder, and the interests of these other users, as represented by their folders All recommendations are specific to the context of a given user folder Recommendation

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Architecture Modular –Basic functionality is allocated on servers Distributed –Servers may be over the Web Open –new services can easily be added Simple communication protocol –XML-RPC (SOAP will be evaluated)

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END Umberto Straccia Scientific coordinator of CYCLADES