Various XML-based approaches aimed at representing complex digital objects have emerged over the last several years. Approaches that are of specific relevance to the Digital Library community include the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS), the IMS Content Packaging XML Binding, the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM), and the XML packaging approach developed by CCSDS Panel 2. The MPEG-21 Digital Item Declaration Language (DIDL) is another XML-packaging specification that, so far, has received little attention in the Digital Library community. This article gives a brief insight into the MPEG-21 standardization effort, and indicates its potential relevance to the Digital Library community. It also highlights major characteristics of DIDL, and details research conducted at the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) into the applicability of DIDL for the representation of complex objects in the LANL repository. The positive outcome of this research has led to a decision to make DIDL-conformant documents the unit of storage in the LANL repository, and suggests that DIDL could also be a valuable building block for other Digital Library projects.
This paper focuses on the use of NISO OpenURL and MPEG-21 Digital Item Processing (DIP) to disseminate complex objects and their contained assets, in a repository architecture designed for the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In the architecture, the MPEG-21 Digital Item Declaration Language (DIDL) is used as the XML-based format to represent complex digital objects. Through an ingestion process, these objects are stored in a multitude of autonomous OAI-PMH repositories. An OAI-PMH compliant Repository Index keeps track of the creation and location of all those repositories, whereas an Identifier Resolver keeps track of the location of individual complex objects and contained assets. An MPEG-21 DIP Engine and an OpenURL Resolver facilitate the delivery of various disseminations of the stored objects. While these aspects of the architecture are described in the context of the LANL library, the paper will also briefly touch on their more general applicability.
This paper details a low-cost, low-maintenance publishing strategy aimed at unlocking the value of Linked Data collections held by libraries, archives and museums. Design/methodology/approach The shortcomings of commonly used Linked Data publishing approaches are identified, and the current lack of substantial collections of Linked Data exposed by libraries, archives and museums is considered. To improve on the discussed status quo, a novel approach for publishing Linked Data is proposed and demonstrated by means of an archive of DBpedia versions, which is queried in combination with other Linked Data sources. Findings We show that our approach makes publishing Linked Data archives easy and affordable, and supports distributed querying without causing untenable load on the Linked Data sources. Practical implications The proposed approach significantly lowers the barrier for publishing, maintaining, and making Linked Data collections queryable. As such, it offers the potential to substantially grow the distributed network of queryable Linked Data sources. Because the approach supports querying without causing unacceptable load on the sources, the queryable interfaces are expected to be more reliable, allowing them to become integral building blocks of robust applications that leverage distributed Linked Data sources. Originality/value The novel publishing strategy significantly lowers the technical and financial barriers that libraries, archives and museums face when attempting to publish Linked Data collections. The proposed approach yields Linked Data sources that can reliably be queried, paving the way for applications that leverage distributed Linked Data sources through federated querying. * Corresponding author 2014). In a recent survey conducted by OCLC Research (Smith-Yoshimura, 2014), 96 participants identified 172 Linked Data projects or services being implemented. Of the 76 that were actually described, 67% published Linked Data. These project mostly aimed at bibliographic metadata enrichment, data interlinking, source referencing, unifying data from various sources, and enhancing existing applications. Meanwhile, the size of some available datasets already ranges between tens of millions and billions of triples. Prominent examples include WorldCat.org (15 billion), Europeana (4 billion), The European Library (2 billion), Library of Congress (500 million) and the British Library (100 million). Efforts are currently ongoing in a wide range of domains (Mitchell, 2015), including electronic thesis and dissertations (ETD) (Mak et al.
This paper focuses on the multifaceted use of the OAI-PMH in a repository architecture designed to store digital assets at the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), and to make the stored assets available in a uniform way to various downstream applications. In the architecture, the MPEG-21 Digital Item Declaration Language is used as the XML-based format to represent complex digital objects. Upon ingestion, these objects are stored in a multitude of autonomous OAI-PMH repositories. An OAI-PMH compliant Repository Index keeps track of the creation and location of all those repositories, whereas an Identifier Resolver keeps track of the location of individual objects. An OAI-PMH Federator is introduced as a single-point-of-access to downstream harvesters. It hides the complexity of the environment to those harvesters, and allows them to obtain transformations of stored objects. While the proposed architecture is described in the context of the LANL library, the paper will also touch on its more general applicability.
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