10.6 Case Study of the Stanford Digital Library...

The Stanford Digital Library Technologies Project, which ended in 2004 was one participant in the DLI2, Digital Library Initiative Phase II. The project began in 1999 supported by several governments, university, corporate sponsors.

The goal of this project was to design and implement the infrastructure and services needed for collaboratively creating, disseminating, sharing and managing information in a digital library context (Stanford University).

In the Stanford Digital Library project, the researchers view long-term digital library systems as collections of widely distributed, autonomously maintained services. They design and implement metadata architecture. The metadata architecture, as shown in Figure 1, includes the following components (Baldonado, et al. 1997):

	Attribute Models. These are generalizations of the traditional attribute sets. Attribute models are searchable
	collections in which each object represents one attribute. Information about each attribute includes its name, the
	type its values may take on, and its relationship to other attributes.
	Attribute Model Translators. These are objects that translate between attribute models. They can be called
	remotely.
	Search Proxy Metadata Facilities. Each search proxy on the InfoBus must provide the following metadata:

		Information about its collection, administrative information such as update frequency, information about its
		search facilities, such as truncation, proximity, etc.

10.6 Case Study of the Stanford Digital Library...

		A list of attribute models it supports, and what uses it can make of them (searchable/retrievable, etc.)
		Statistical information about its collection to support resource discovery.

	Metadata Repository. This is a possibly replicated collection combining attribute models, attribute model
	translators, and metadata information from the search proxies.

The current implementation includes six attribute model translators, table-driven query translation, content statistics over the CS-TR collection, and dynamic attribute derivations.

10.6 Case Study of the Stanford Digital Library...