|
SIMILE is a research project investigating how to extend DSpace [dsp], an existing project between Hewlett-Packard Laboratories [hew] and MIT Libraries [mit]. DSpace provides stable long-term storage for the digital products of MIT faculty and researchers by offering:
* users with easy remote access so they can read and search DSpace items from the World Wide Web.
* contributors with the advantages of digital distribution and long-term preservation for a variety of formats including text, audio, video, images, datasets and more. Authors can store their digital works in collections maintained by MIT communities.
* the institution with the opportunity to provide access to all their research through one interface. The repository is organized to accommodate the varying policy and workflow issues inherent in a multi-disciplinary environment. Submission workflow and access policies can be customized to adhere closely to each community"s needs.
SIMILE aims to enhance DSpace and provide support for arbitrary schemas and metadata primarily through the application of the Semantic Web [sem]. The project also aims to implement a digital asset dissemination architecture that will provide a mechanism to add useful views to any particular digital artifact, such as an asset, a schema, or a metadata instance, and bind those views to other consuming services.
In conducting this work, we hope to apply and build upon prior work from MIT"s Haystack project [hay], which seeks to bring modern information management and retrieval technologies to the average computer user in order to make computers a more compelling environment for users to interact with their information. Haystack looks into the use of artificial intelligence techniques for analyzing unstructured information and providing more accurate retrieval. It also deals with the modeling, management, and display of user data in more natural and useful ways. In addition Haystack is potentially one of the services consuming information from the SIMILE dissemination architecture.
|