"Lifecycles for Information Integration in Distributed Scholarly Communication"

Summary

Scientific research is embracing highly collaborative, network-based, and data-intensive standards of practice. As scientific research transforms itself, the need for a natively digital, network-based scholarly communication system that is able to capture the digital scholarly record, make it accessible, and preserve it over time becomes evident. The ubiquity of the Internet provides the foundation for a new publication paradigm that is inclusive, responsive, and adaptive - one that resembles the scientific process that it intends to document.

The Pathways project will develop broadly applicable models and protocols to support a loosely-coupled, highly distributed, interoperable scholarly communication system. A graph-based information model will provide a layer of abstraction over heterogeneous resources (data, content, and services). A service-oriented process model will enable the expression and invocation of multi-stage compositional, computational, and transformational information flows. Development of a graph-based information model will investigate the tension between simplicity and complexity inherent in constraining the model to permit normalization of heterogeneous resources, while still providing extensibility to support a broad spectrum of uses. The model will assert the abstract equivalence of content and functions to support the seamless composition of compound objects consisting of both static and dynamic resources. This provides a foundation for the development of a process model. The process model work will investigate the use of functional programming principles to enable easy composition of distributed processes, or pathways, through which scientific results flow. The functional paradigm is well suited to a distributed architecture where it will be possible to exploit the natural parallelism of networked processes. This work will also investigate the integration of authorization and obligation policies.

Work to date has resulted in a number of publications and to a significant new effort, Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE), sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. ORE intends to take the results of Pathways work as a starting point for the development of interoperability standards to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content.

This work is supported by the National Science Foundation Division of Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS) through grant number IIS-0430906 (September 2004 through August 2007).

Publications

• Simeon Warner, Jeroen Bekaert, Carl Lagoze, Xiaoming Liu, Sandy Payette, Herbert Van de Sompel. Pathways: Augmenting interoperability across scholarly repositories. Accepted for IJDL Special Issue on Digital Libraries and eScience. Also available as arXiv:cs/0610031.
• Herbert Van deSompel, Carl Lagoze, Jeroen Bekaert, Xiaoming Liu, Sandy Payette, Simeon Warner. An Interoperable Fabric for Scholarly Value Chains. D-Lib Magazine, 12(10), 2006.
• Herbert Van de Sompel, Sandy Payette, John Erickson, Carl Lagoze and Simeon Warner. Rethinking Scholarly Communication: Building the System that Scholars Deserve. D-Lib Magazine 10 (2004).

People

The Pathways team are Carl Lagoze, Sandy Payette, Simeon Warner, and Herbert Van de Sompel.