[UPS] copy of letter of intent about NSF ITR and Open Archives
Edward A. Fox
fox@vt.edu
Fri, 24 Dec 1999 11:53:39 -0500
Hi! See below a copy of an old msg about the Open Archives project.
This should help explain another msg being sent about the
related pre-proposal to NSF.
Regards, eaf
-----Original Message-----
From: Fox, Edward
Sent: Tuesday, November 16, 1999 12:09 AM
To: 'itr-loi@nsf.gov'
Cc: 'ups@vole.lanl.gov'; 'caar@loc.gov'; 'Kurt Bollacker'; 'Leslie
Carr'; 'clifford@cni.org'; 'Mark Doyle'; 'Dale_flecker@harvard.edu';
french@virginia.edu; 'Michael Friedman'; 'Paul M. Gherman'; 'Paul
Ginsparg'; 'Stevan Harnad'; 'Thomas Krichel'; 'Carl Lagoze'; 'Steve
Lawrence'; 'Rick Luce'; 'kmaly@storm.cs.odu.edu'; 'wnm@cs.virginia.edu';
'nelson michael l'; 'John Ober'; 'bparks@wuecona.wustl.edu';
mas4n@virginia.edu; tls@virginia.edu; 'herbert.vandesompel@rug.ac.be';
'Eric F. Van de Velde'; 'djw@mellon.org'; 'Ken Weiss';
'carroll@cs.vt.edu'; 'downeyg@vt.edu'; 'jayjon@vt.edu';
'gailmac@vt.edu'; 'eaton@vt.edu'
Subject: letter of intent on Open Archives Initiative
A. Tentative Title: Research Extending the Open Archives Initiative
B. PI, Co-PIs, and Possible Participating Institutions
B.1 Virginia Tech:
Principal Investigator and Project Director: Edward A. Fox
Co-PIs: James R. Bohland, John M. Carroll, Gary L. Downey,
John Eaton, Gail McMillan
B.2 University of Virginia:
Co-PIs: James C. French, Worthy N. Martin,
Mark Shields, Thornton L. Staples
B.3 Participants in the Open Archives Initiative
(hence possible participants in this project):
Caroline Arms, Library of Congress
Leslie Carr, University of Southampton
Mark Doyle, American Physical Society
Dale Flecker, Harvard University
Michael Friedman, HighWire Press, Stanford University
Paul M. Gherman, Vanderbilt University
Paul Ginsparg, Los Alamos National Laboratory & xxx
Stevan Harnad, University of Southampton
Thomas Krichel, University of Surrey & RePEc
Carl Lagoze, Cornell University
Rick Luce, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Clifford Lynch, Coalition for Networked Information
Kurt Maly, Old Dominion University
Michael L. Nelson, NASA Langley Research Center
John Ober, California Digital Library
Bob Parks, Washington University & EconWPA
Herbert Van de Sompel, University of Ghent
Eric F. Van de Velde, California Institute of Technology
Don Waters, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Ken Weiss, California Digital Library
B.4 NEC Research Institute - possible collaborators
C. Lee Giles and Steve Lawrence
B.5 Internet Archive - possible collaborator
Kurt Bollacker
C. Description (limited to 500 words)
This project involves research extending the Open Archives Initiative,
formerly called the Universal Preprint Service Initiative. It
relates to ITR program description areas:
a. Information Technology Education and Workforce
b. Human-Computer Interface
c. Information Management
d. Scalable Information Infrastructure
e. Social and Economic Implications of Information Technology
but focuses on area (c) with significant components in area (e)
and important studies in area (b).
During its five year period, to start 1/1/2001, this project will
work with a diverse collection of archives. These sometimes are called
repositories or digital libraries; here the focus is on handling
archival literature which those submitting or acquiring wish to be
permanent, perhaps in connection with the work of the Internet Archive.
These archives contain a broad range of materials, varying in topical
area, genre, level, method of collection/submission, detail of metadata
description, etc. This project will demonstrate, using methods such
as harvesting and federated search, how the union of the archives can
be accessed in ways not previously supported.
Studies will explore how searching, browsing, and linking can proceed
across the entire collection. Access criteria, organization of results,
and presentation of findings will support a wide variety of views of the
heterogeneous content.
The underlying approach will be to extend earlier work on open digital
libraries, building upon efforts like at Stanford and Cornell, wherein
a wide range of services are carefully defined with suitable protocols
that support interoperation and composition.
The agreements from the Universal Preprint Service Initiative will be
extended so that not only can there be interchange of metadata between
repositories but also integrated processing of citations (as in CiteSeer)
and dynamic linking (as in SFX). A shared log format will be adopted and
used
to help with remote analysis of usage, according to the participatory
evaluation method from Virginia Tech.
In addition to research on collections, services, protocols, logging,
interoperability, support of multiple and personal views, and effective
operation, this project also will explore a wide variety of key research
questions that arise from the availability of the open archive, like:
* Will research build upon newer work than was possible before,
since the delays in learning about scholarly efforts are reduced?
Will that happen universally, or only in some situations?
* Will scholars look at more works than before since it is easier?
If so, how much of those works will be examined? Which parts?
* How do we deal with lack of metadata provided, to synthesize it? What
are the effects of lack of metadata? Of very detailed metadata? How
much of it is used? How often? How does this compare to only having
full-text searching and linking?
* How can authors and users learn about electronic publishing, digital
libraries, and key concepts of information science through participation
in this effort?
In summary, this project will involve a diverse range of research
investigations made possible by the ongoing development of the
Open Archives Initiative, and will develop and validate methods
and tools that support such collections and services.
D. Appendix: Official press release describing the
UPS Initiative's meeting in Santa Fe
(since renamed "Open Archives Initiative",
to be based at openarchives.org)
First meeting of the Universal Preprint Service Initiative
UPS Initiative: Paul Ginsparg, Rick Luce, Herbert Van de Sompel
<<http://vole.lanl.gov/ups/ups1-press.htm>http://vole.lanl.gov/ups/ups1-pres
s.htm>
Meeting:
* Location: Santa Fe, New Mexcio, US, October 21-22
1999
* Sponsors: Council on Library and Information
Resources, the Digital Library Federation, the
Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources
Coalition, Association of Research Libraries, the
Research Library of the Los Alamos National
Laboratory.
* Meeting moderators: Clifford Lynch & Don Waters.
* Represented institutions/organizations: American
Physical Society, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation,
Association of Research Libraries, California
Institute of Technology, Coalition for Networked
Information, Cornell University, Council on
Library and Information Resources, Digital
Library Federation, Harvard University, HighWire
Press, Library of Congress, Los Alamos National
Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, NASA Langley, Old Dominion
University, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic
Resources Coalition, Stanford Linear Accelerator
Center, University of California, University of
Ghent, University of Southampton, University of
Surrey, Vanderbilt University, Virginia Tech and
Washington University.
* Represented eprint-initiatives: arXiv.org (=xxx),
CogPrints, NDLTD, RePEc, EconWPA, NCSTRL, NTRS
* Participants: see seperate list
Executive Summary
The Universal Preprint Service initiative has been set up to create a
forum to discuss and solve matters of interoperability between author
self-archiving solutions, as a way to promote their global acceptance
(see http://vole.lanl.gov/ups/ups.htm ).
The first, largest and most important such archive is the Los Alamos
National Laboratory (LANL) Physics Archive. Founded by Paul Ginsparg in
1991, LANL now houses over 100,000 papers, mirrored worldwide in 15
countries with over 50,000 users daily and still growing (see
http://arXiv.org/cgi-bin/show_stats ). Other disciplines and
institutions have begun to create public research archives along the
lines of LANL but what is needed are conventions that archives could
adopt to ensure that they work together so that any paper in any of
these archives could be found from anyone's desktop worldwide, as if it
were all in one virtual public library.
The participants in the meeting were digital librarians and computer
scientists specializing in archiving, metadata, and interoperability,
and they included the founders of the principal public research
archives that exist so far. The participants were diverse in their
underlying motivations, but entirely unified in their objective of
paving the way for universal public archiving of the scientific and
scholarly research literature on the Web.
The group agreed on minimal technical requirements for archives. These
will be published seperately as the "Santa Fe Conventions" and, in the
next six months, will be implemented in the existing archives.
Technical Summary
The first meeting concentrated on the creation of cross-archive
end-user services. The aim was to try and identify general
architectural and technical characteristics of archive solutions, that
would facilitate the creation of such services. These characteristics
could then be used as recommendations for existing and upcoming
initiatives.
The meeting started off with a presentation and demonstration by a team
consisting of Herbert Van de Sompel (University of Ghent and Los Alamos
National Laboratory), Michael Nelson (NASA Langley and Old Dominion
University) and Thomas Krichel (University of Surrey and RePEc
initiative). This group had built an experimental end-user service
providing access to data originating from main archive initiatives
(arXiv, RePEc, NCSTRL, NDLTD, NTRS). A variety of technologies were
used in the project, including NCSTRL+ as the digital library service,
intelligent objects called buckets as a means to store the archive
metadata and the SFX linking solution as a means to interlink the
eprint data with the traditional scholarly communication mechanism. The
presentation identified problems that arose during the project, and
discussion of those served to launch the UPS meeting. This presentation
was followed by position papers on interoperability issues presented by
Carl Lagoze (Cornell University), Kurt Maly (Old Dominion University),
Ed Fox (Virginia Tech) and Carolyne Arms (Library of Congress).
Following the initial presentations, there was a panel discussion in
which Paul Ginsparg (Los Alamos National Laboratory), Paul Gherman
(Vanderbilt University), Eric Van de Velde (CalTech) and John Ober
(University of California) expressed their opinion on the possible pros
and cons of institutional versus discipline-oriented archive
initiatives. The UPS group concluded that many different archive
initiatives were likely to emerge, with different conceptual,
organizational and technical foundations. In order for such initiatives
to successfully become part of the scholarly communication system,
interoperability was seen as a crucial factor.
The UPS group agreed that interoperability hinges on a fundamental
distinction between the archive-functions, which include
data-collection and maintenance and end-user functions, like the
cross-system search and linking prototype service described in the
opening session. Although archive initiatives can implement their own
end-user services, it is essential that the archives remain "open" in
order to allow others to equally create such services. This concept was
formalized in the distinction between providers of data (the archive
initiatives) and implementers of data services (the initiatives that
want to create end-user services for archive initiatives).
Stimulated by a presentation by Thomas Krichel, the UPS group agreed that an
essential feature of the Santa Fe Conventions would be that providers of
data use a standard mechanism to state the conditions under which their
datasets can be used by implementers of data services. Similarly, the
implementers of data services could describe the use they make of archive
data.
This organizational argument was followed by a discussion on the
technicalities of creating end-user services for data originating from
different archives. The group recognized that there are basically two
ways to implement these: a distributed searching approach and a
harvesting approach. The former would require archives to implement a
joint distributed search protocol, which is not considered to be a
low-entry requirement. Moreover, the technical experts recognized that
there are important problems of scale when implementing such
distributed search solutions, in light of the possible emergence of
thousands of institutional and/or subject-oriented archives worldwide.
As such, the group decided this was not a realistic approach at this
point in time. Therefore, as in the experimental project presented at
the beginning of the meeting, a harvesting solution was proposed. Such
a harvesting solution would allow trusted parties - the ones that
subscribe to the Santa Fe Conventions - to selectively collect data
from different archives. It was identified that such a technique
requires an understanding regarding:
* Protocols to selectively harvest data;
* Criteria that can be used to selectively harvest data;
* Metadata formats that are used by archive solutions to respond to
harvesting requests.
It was recognized that providers of data could describe the details of these
interfaces in standard ways thus enabling implementers of data to create
archive-specific harvesters. Still, the UPS group decided to go one step
further and to highly recommend the following:
* Protocols to selectively harvest data: implementation of part of the
Dienst protocol in order to achieve a uniform way to poll an archive
for its logical division(s) (subarchives) and to selectively harvest
data from these divisions.
* Criteria that can be used to selectively harvest data: there should at
least be support for a bulk harvest of all data from an archive, as
well as a mechanism to harvest based on accession date. Other
harvesting criteria that were thought to be important included author
affiliation, subject, publication type.
* Metadata formats that are used by archive solutions to respond to
harvesting requests: It is recognized that archives will use (an)
internal metadata format(s) best suited to deal with the material to be
described. Still, the UPS group decided to propose a minimal Dublin
Core compliant metadata set, called the Santa Fe Set, that should be
made available by all archives. It is desirable that archives are able
to respond to harvesting requests with data delivered in both the
internal metadata format as in the Santa Fe Set format.
The representatives of existing archive initiatives at the meeting as
well as those from institutions that are in the process of setting up
archive initiatives agreed to comply to those guidelines. The Dienst
protocol will be enhanced to allow for the functions mentioned above
and a minimal Dienst release facilitating the process of making an
archive compliant to the required aspects of Dienst will be made
available. A transport format for MARC-formatted metadata will be
proposed, as well as an XML DTD for the description of the Santa Fe
Set. The recommendations will be extensively documented on a Web site.
Adoption of the recommendations will be promoted worldwide.
The way forward
* The minimal Dienst protocol set will be implemented for all archives
that were represented at the meeting. This will allow for a first round
of experimentation with the creation of end-user services layered over
existing archives.
* The group identified the urgent need to discuss the mechanisms used to
submit material to archives.
* Paul Ginsparg suggested that a next meeting should be held in Europe,
in the first quarter of next year.
* It was also thought to be important to have a presentation and/or
workshop on the UPS Initiative at the ACM 2000 Conference on Digital
Libraries as well as at the European ECDLC.
* The experimental, non-productional prototype that was presented at the
meeting will temporarily be available for exploration at the beginning
of November 1999 at http://ups.cs.odu.edu . The representatives of Old
Dominion University, the Research Library of the Los Alamos National
Laboratory and the University of Ghent expressed their interest in
continuing this prototyping work.
* The UPS Initiative will soon be given a new name and Web site.
__________________
October 29th 1999
get in touch with the UPS
initiative by contacting
herbert.vandesompel@rug.ac.be
Professor Edward A. Fox, Ph.D.
Department of Computer Science
660 McBryde Hall, M/C 0106
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA 24061 USA
ph +1-540-231-5113, FAX +1-540-231-6075
cellular phone/pager +1-540-230-6266
email fox@cs.vt.edu, WWW http://fox.cs.vt.edu