[OAI-general] questionnaire

[Umberto Straccia]

Dear sirs,

The CYCLADES consortium aims to elicit potential users' views on the
functionality and services provided by the CYCLADES environment. A
questionnaire has been devised for this purpose. We would like to ask
you to take a few moments and familiarize yourself with the description
and purpose of CYCLADES and also fill out the user requirements questionnaire
at the following location:

http://sappho.ics.forth.gr:5000/User_Requirements/questionnaire.html


Your effort in filling out this questionnaire is greatly appreciated.
This questionnaire has been devised for the elicitation of user requirements
for the project CYLADES (IST-2000-25456). A brief description of the
project and its objectives is given below as well as at the aforementioned
web site.

Sincerely,

The CYCLADES Consortium,





Project Description

The main objective of CYCLADES (http://www.iei.pi.cnr.it/cyclades/) is to
develop advanced Internet accessible services to support scholars both
individually and as members of networked communities when interacting with
large interdisciplinary electronic (e-print) archives}. CYCLADES aims at
supporting the transition of e-print systems into genuine building blocks
of a transformed scholarly communication model by developing a set of
leading-edge technologies providing innovative methods for information access,
dissemination, sharing and collaborative work.

The proposed open archives environment consists of two components: the
archives and the services. To the former  contribute the Open
Archives initiative (OAI). CYCLADES will base the development of the service
environment on these specifications. In particular, a core set of cross-archive
value-added services will be developed to constitute a federation of
independent but interoperable services. The Service Environment will provide
OAi compliant functionality.  The CYCLADES services comprise the following:

Search and Browse Service: develops plans for the execution of user
queries. An ad-hoc or a profile-based user query will be decomposed into
more simple sub-queries to be sent to the Access Service for execution.
The results of the sub-queries are fused and returned to the user.
A browse facility is also supported.

Collection Service: provides mechanisms for dynamically building meaningful
collections.

Personalization Service: supports personalization of information
access on the basis of individual user profiles and of profiles of scholarly
communities to which users belong.

Recommendation Service: provides recommendations to satisfy information needs
of a user based on ratings provided by other users or groups.

Collaborative Work Service: supports collaboration between members of virtual
communities. Community working areas are created to use the OAi content in
collaborative work.