Architecture and software solutions
| Published date | 01 February 2000 |
| Pages | 35-40 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520010320059 |
| Date | 01 February 2000 |
| Author | Tracy Gardner,Renato Iannella |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Architecture and
software solutions
Tracy Gardner and
Renato Iannella
1. Introduction
The current subject gateways have evolved
over a time when the discipline of Internet
Resource Discovery was in its infancy. This is
reflected in the various technical deployment
decisions used in these subject gateways over
the last few years. The lack of well-
established, light-weight, deployable, easy-to-
use, standards for metadata and information
retrieval clearly shows this.
At the recent IMesh Workshop, where
subject gateway researchers and practitioners
met to further collaboration in this area, the
main technical observations were that:
.a variety of technologies are in use by
subject-gateways;
.functionality is continually being
improved due to user requirements and
new research;
.standalone services need to be joined
together in ways that add value.
The main technical focus of the workshop was
interoperability:
The next challenge is to join services together in
ways that add value, and to enhance the
functionality of subject gateway software to meet
ever-emerging requirements. Interoperability is
necessary for the first objective in order to allow
gateways using different software to
communicate; interoperability is required if the
second objective is to be achieved without
unnecessary duplication of effort (Dempsey et
al., forthcoming).
In this article we provide an introduction to
the architecture, standards and software
solutions in use by subject gateways, and to
the issues that must be addressed to support
future subject gateways.
2. Architecture
There are two main aspects of subject
gateway architecture:
(1) the architecture of an individual subject
gateway; and
(2) the overall architecture of a network of
such gateways.
2.1 Subject gateway architecture
A typical subject gateway can be mapped on
to a three-layered architecture:
(1) resource description layer ± contains
metadata about resources;
The authors
Tracy Gardner is based at the UK Office for Library and
Information Networking (UKOLN), University of Bath, UK.
E-mail: t.a.gardner@ukoln.ac.uk
Renato Iannella is based at Distributed Systems
Technology Centre (DSTC), Australia. E-mail:
renato@dstc.edu.au
Keywords
Computer architectures, Internet, Software development,
Standards
Abstract
The current subject gateways have evolved over time
when the discipline of Internet resource discovery was in
its infancy. This is reflected by the lack of well-
established, light-weight, deployable, easy-to-use,
standards for metadata and information retrieval. We
provide an introduction to the architecture, standards and
software solutions in use by subject gateways, and to the
issues that must be addressed to support future subject
gateways.
Electronic access
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is
available at
http://www.emerald-library.com
Issues
35
Online Information Review
Volume 24 .Number 1 .2000 .pp. 35±39
#MCB University Press .ISSN 1468-4527
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