Representing Contextualized Information in the NSDL

Abstract

Abstract. The NSDL (National Science Digital Library) is funded by the National Science Foundation to advance science and math education. The initial product was a metadata-based digital library providing search and access to distributed resources. Our recent work recognizes the importance of context -relations, metadata, annotations -for the pedagogical value of a digital library. This new architecture uses Fedora, a tool for representing complex content, data, metadata, web-based services, and semantic relationships, as the basis of an information network overlay (INO). The INO provides an extensible knowledge base for an expanding suite of digital library services.

Ncore

“…Work on the first version of the NSDL architecture, a metadata-based union-catalog paradigm, was described in [15], and a discussion of the design and motivation for the second major version of the NSDL architecture, NSDL 2.0, from which NCore derives, is presented in [16,18]. Earlier related work on annotation systems, resource linking, and the importance of context for learning is extensively discussed and cited in [16] and will not be repeated here. Earlier work on the role of collections and aggregations in digital libraries is cited extensively in the section below on organizing the repository.…”

“…A full description of the initial repository architecture of NCore can be found in [16,17], but we will briefly review the key concepts here. The rest of section 3 will discuss changes to the architecture and implementation as a result of two years of development and production experience since the initial report.…”

“…This paper first presents the NCore architecture, focusing on developments since the initial description of the architecture for NSDL 2.0 appeared in [16]. In particular, we provide a detailed explanation and analysis of the use of aggregations in NCore, which is one of the keys to the flexibility of the platform.…”