Building a distributed digital library for natural disasters metadata with grid services and RDF
| Pages | 230-245 |
| Date | 01 May 2005 |
| Published date | 01 May 2005 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/01435120510596080 |
| Author | Wei Xing,Marios D. Dikaiakos,Hua Yang,Angelos Sphyris,George Eftichidis |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science |
Building a distributed digital
library for natural disasters
metadata with grid services and
RDF
Wei Xing and Marios D. Dikaiakos
Department of Computer Science, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus
Hua Yang
Xian Institute of Post and Telecommunication, Nicosia, Cyprus, and
Angelos Sphyris and George Eftichidis
Algosystems SA, Kalithea, Greece
Abstract
Purpose – This paper aims to describe the main challenges of identifying and accessing useful
information and knowledge about natural hazards and disasters results. The paper presents a
grid-based digital library system designed to address the challenges.
Design/methodology/approach – The need to organize and publish metadata about European
research results in the field of natural disasters has been met with the help of two innovative
technologies: the Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA) and the Resource Description Framework
(RDF). OGSA provides a common platform for sharing distributed metadata securely. RDF facilitates
the creation and exchange of metadata.
Findings – Using grid technology allows the RDF metadata of European research results in the field
of natural disasters to be shared securely and effectively in a heterogeneous network environment.
Originality/value – A metadata approach is proposed for the extraction of the metadata, and their
distribution to third parties in batch, and their sharing with other applications can be a quickly
process. Furthermore, a method is set out to describe metadata in a common and open format, which
can become a widely accepted standard; the existence of a common standard enables the metadata
storage in different platforms while supporting the capability of distributed queries across different
metadata databases, the integration of metadata extracted from different sources, etc. It can be used
for the general-purpose search engines.
Keywords Digital libraries,Data analysis, Natural disasters
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Research in natural hazards focuses on unraveling and understanding processes,
comprehensive risk assessment, forecasting and risk management and mitigation.
Advances have been made in seismic research, forest fires, landslides, floods, volcanic
hazards, avalanches and technological hazards, particularly with the development of
improved models and technologies for hazard forecasting, risk assessment and
mitigation. Research projects focusing on natural hazards and disasters produce
results in the form of explicit or tacit knowledge represented by reports, project
deliverables, data-sets derived from field work, interesting training and dissemination
material, etc. These artifacts are usually published and described on web sites
The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister www.emeraldinsight.com/0143-5124.htm
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Library Management
Vol. 26 No. 4/5, 2005
pp. 230-245
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
0143-5124
DOI 10.1108/01435120510596080
maintained by project partners during the duration of the respective projects.
Following project completion, however, project teams dissolve and web-site
maintenance and support gradually fade out. Hence, general-purpose search engines
are used to search for past-project results. Nevertheless, search-engine query results
provide large numbers of unrelated links. Furthermore, hyperlinks pointi ng to
potentially useful material do not come with references or additional links to adequate
information describing the “value” of identified resources. Consequently, ident ifying
and accessing useful information and knowledge becomes very difficult. Effectively,
valuable knowledge is lost and it is practically impossible to find and take advantage
of it.
To address this problem, the Directorate General for Research of the European
Union undertook the initiative to establish the European Mediterranean Disaster
Information Network (EU-MEDIN, 2003). EU-MEDIN’s goal is to foster coordinated
and increased access to data and expert know-how before, during, and after a disaster
strikes. The availability of reliable and timely information could contribute to our
knowledge for reducing impacts of hazards and risks and bring about improved
disaster preparedness in Europe in the near future. As the first step for the deployment
of EU-MEDIN, the EU commissioned Algosystems SA with the development of a
thematic web portal to support the storage and retrieval of metadata pertaining to
results of research in natural disasters. Project-related metadata can be inserted via a
Web interface to a back-end database (EU-MEDIN, 2003). Interested researchers can
use the EU-MEDIN portal to query the database and search for project-artifacts.
This approach, however, encodes and maintains the metadata in the
platform-specific format of the particular database system chosen for the
development of the EU-MEDIN portal. Therefore, the extraction of the metadata,
their distribution to third parties in batch, and their sharing with other applications can
be a lengthy process. Furthermore, there is a need to describe metadata in a common
and open format, which can become a widely accepted standard; the existence of a
common standard enables the metadata storage in different platforms while
supporting the capability of distributed queries across different metadata databases,
the integration of metadata extracted from different sources, etc.
In this paper, we present gDisDL, a grid-based digital library system designed to
address some of the problems mentioned above. Our approach comprises:
.A schema for describing project-related metadata in a platform-independent
form, using the Resource Description Framework (RDF). RDF is a general
framework for describing metadata of Internet resources and for processing this
metadata; it is a standard of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). RDF supports
the interoperability between applications that exchange machine-understandable
information on the web.
.A digital library system enabling the collection and storage of RDF-encoded
metadata in distributed repositories, and the retrieval thereof from remote sites.
This library is implemented as a Grid-service architecture comprised of a set of
grid services, which allow the storage, management, and query of RDF metadata
in a secure and distributed manner. To develop the library we use the Globus
Toolkit 3 (Sotomayor, 2003) for programming grid services and the Jena toolkit
(JENA, 2003) for handling RDF data.
Natural disasters
metadata
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