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BRICKS A Distributed Service

Infrastructure for cultural digital library services

Massimo Bertoncini, Engineering Ingegneria Informatica

http://www.brickscommunity.org

Workshop on Emerging Technologies for Digital Libraries

Wisla, Poland, 9 november 2006

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Outline

• What is BRICKS?– The BRICKS Concept– What does BRICKS allow?– Results

• BRICKS today– Integration– Services– Applications

• Next steps

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What is BRICKS?

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Project Identity Card

• Project Acronym: BRICKS - Building Resources for

Integrated Cultural Knowledge Services

• Project type: Integrated Project in FP6

• Thematic area: Digital Libraries Services

• Consortium: 22 organisations from 9 countries

• Duration: 42 months (January 2004 – June 2007)

• Funding: 7,2 Mega Euro

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The BRICKS Concept

• Connecting cultural digital content through a distributed service infrastructure

• Setting up the organisational and technological foundations for a distributed digital library, supporting the emerging concept of a shared European Digital Memory.

• A digital library in this context refers to a networked system of services, targeted to libraries, archives, museums, allowing any kind of user to access and exploit globally distributed collections of multimedia digital content

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What does BRICKS allow?

• Integrating digital content from European Cultural Heritage Institutions:– A portal, but peer-to-peer rather than centralized

• Providing basic and advanced Cultural Heritage Services– Low level services for management of users, content,

metadata– High level applications

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BRICKS main issues

• BRICKS handles any kind of digital content and metadata• BRICKS is designed for all kind of cultural institutions (museums,

libraries, archives, audio-visual collections)• BRICKS supports standard protocols (OAI-PMH, Web-Services) • BRICKS is distributed, peer-to-peer, and seamlessly integrates

distributed content repositories• BRICKS provides interoperable Digital Rights Management• BRICKS is multilingual

• BRICKS software is Free Software

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Results: BRICKS Distributed Service Infrastructure

• Service oriented– Standardized interface descriptions

based on Web Services

– Flexible composition of services

• Decentralized P2P– P2P Service discovery

– P2P Indexing (DHT)

– Avoid central coordination

• Open Source– LGPL Licence

– Lower barrier for usage

• Software for running Bnodes– More than 300.000 code lines

– About 1.000 classes

• Multilingual

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Results: Distributed Service Infrastructure

• Distributed Service Infrastructure, consisting of:

– BRICKS Cultural Service Library

– BRICKS Cultural Heritage Network (BNet)

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Results: BRICKS Cultural Service Library

• An open source library of components that offer a wide range of functions within a modular service-oriented architecture based on Web Services

• Benefits– Low development costs for cultural applications– Access to a large pool of digital cultural content– Sustainable evolution as an open source project

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Results: BRICKS Cultural Heritage Network (Bnet)

• The collection of BRICKS Nodes (BNodes) hosted by European cultural heritage institutions and integrated through a peer-to-peer network.

• Benefits– Critical mass– Low costs for installations and

maintenance– Easy integration olf existing

digital content– High visibility

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The BRICKS Service Oriented Architecture

• The BRICKS SOA is based on Web Services– HTTP transport (firewall friendly)– XML-based protocol (SOAP)– Platform independence– Service description over WSDL (Web Services Definiton

Language)

• BRICKS Implementation– AXIS: Apache open source SOAP implementation– Servlet Container: Apache Tomcat– Java 1.4.2 + Installation Package

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Decentralized Architecture

• Advantages– Scalability

• Storage and processor capacity distributed– Control

• Individual Nodes have full control over their content– Sustainability

• No centrslized support required beyond the end of the project

• Disadvantages– Performance

• Trade-offs: distributed systems vs “Google-like” systems

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A look into a BNode

BNode {

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BRICKS today

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BRICKS Integration

• The BRICKS approach is not to replace but to integrate with existing systems

• Rely on already accepted protocols in the Digital Libraries domain to tap existing metadata and content databases– OAI Harvesting– RDF-RDBMS mapping

• Content may be imported by reference or copied

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BRICKS Integration

• Import of existing metadata via the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting (OAI-PMH)

– Easy to understand– Easy to use and minimal

implementation effort for cultural institutions

– Gives a minimum level of interoperability (Simple Dublin Core)

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BRICKS Services

• Content Management

• Metadata Management

• Collection Management

• Search for Information

• Annotation Management

• Security and DRM

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Content Management• Two ways to handle Content

in BRICKS– stored locally at site of a

member party, accessed via URL

– stored within BRICKS

• Implemetation based on Java Content Repository (JCR/Jackrabbit)

• Provide a meta-content model– Re-use of existing content

models– Use standard models– Built-in support to CIDOC-

CRM

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Metadata Management• Handles descriptive Metadata• Follows the OAI methodology for the

management of metadata records• Support of different metadata schemas

defined in OWL-DL• Bibliographic records in RDF; query on

records in SPARQL• Implementation based on Jena Semantic

Web Framework• Two-layer Data Model• RDF Graph layer

– RDF / RDFS / OWL– Inference via Jena or external Inference

Engines– Query via Jena (RDQL)

• Presentation layer– Document-centred view – Hides RDF graph and dependency on Jena

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Collection Management• Organize content items in hierarchical structures (or folders)• Two types of Collections:

– Physical Collections• Organise resources on one BNode

• Each content item in exactly one Physical Collection

• Created by Content Provider

– Logical Collections• Can include content from

multiple BNodes

• Contain references to content

• A content item (reference) can be in many Logical Collections

• Help users structuring content they are interested in

• Created by end users

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Search for information• Discover DL resources

– regardless of their location, format, language, etc.– By Content (words, pixels, voxels) – By Meaning, as represented using Ontologies, Thesauri, Classification Schemes,

Vocabularies – By Profile attributes (creator, title, type, …)– By Structure

• Extensibility: in content types, semantic description schemes, languages, user types

• Design: 2-layer approach– Global layer, fixed: Query Mediator (and its helpers)– Local layer, variable: Specialized Query Evaluators

• Query types:– Simple search: full text search on metadata records– Advanced search: DB-like on metadata attributes– Ontology search: KR-like on ontologies– Combinations of the above

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Annotation Management

• Collaborative aspects of BRICKS

• Annotate images or image parts with text or links to other items

• BRICKS Annotations– Provide background information– Support collaborative teams of

scholars– Enable contextual search and

browsing

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SecurityPillars

WS-SecurityBNode Security Services

Web Services

Security Manager

AccountingManager

DRMManager

UserManager

Trust Manager

ExternalPaymentGateway

OrganizationAccounting

Dept

External DRM

Repository

External User

Directory

EbXML

LDAP

HTTPsMpeg21

Other BNODEs

WS-Security + BNode Trust

Exisiting infrastructure

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IPR Management

• Open “Interoperable” DRM– Open Source– Open to standards (M-PEG 21, ORDL)– Open to concerned vendors

• BRICKS Approach– MPEG-21 REL is adopted as the Right Expression Language for BRICKS

• Advantages:– MPEG-21 is an ISO Standard (good for interoperability)– Expressiveness: a very rich vocabulary allows to express many usage

types and conditions, supporting all mentioned scenarios.– Openess, basis for many interoperability initiatives (i.e. OMA, DMP, ...)– Support of PKI for identifying Principals– XML-based

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Applications

• Foundation – Workspace– Desktop

• Pillars– On-line exhibition– EMYA Award Management– Archaeological Digital Library– Finds Identifier

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BRICKS Applications: Workspace

• a web application (thin client) accessing BRICKS Cultural Service Library

• Enables direct access to the Cultural Heritage Network (Bnet)

• Primary users are end-users (citizens)

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BRICKS Applications: Desktop

• a rich client application accessing BRICKS Foundation services

• Enables direct access to the BNet

• primary users are experts (administrators, researchers, educators, application developers)

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BRICKS Applications: European Museum of the Year Award

• integration of web sites with the BRICKS Cultural Service Library

• Exploiting the BRICKS Cultural Heritage Network as a gateway to the BRICKS Community

• Primary users are– museum managers

– Curators

– Professional

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BRICKS Applications: European Museum of the Year Award

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BRICKS Applications: Online Exhibitions Tool

• Allows one to build easily a web site for online exhibitions, re-using existing content and metadata

• Primary users are cultural institution managers, curators, museum visitors

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• Web-based application Built on BRICKS Workspace– “Guideline” for the access to

BRICKS functionality

– Reuse existing functionality

– Multilingual support

– Flexibility

• Built on BRICKS Cultural Services Library– Reuses existing functionality

– Provides the ability to create common online exhibition among different institutions

BRICKS Applications: Online Exhibitions Tool

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BRICKS Applications: Archaeological Digital Library Access to digital archaeological

resources provided via OAI-PMH Provide Metadata and contents

(iconographic, bibliographic, unedited sources, geographical content via WebGIS)

Possibility to enrich archaelogical contents using annotations

• Primary users are– museum managers

– Curators

– Professional

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BRICKS Applications: Archaeological Finds Identifier

Helps general users to classify an object they found by comparing it to a reference collection

To narrow down the search the user is presented with a set of questions easy to answer (material, weight, size,…)

The user can select: Guided search Detail view (full metadata and

image display) Map view (display the place of

discovery of the object)

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BRICKS Applications: Archaeological Finds Identifier –Building the Reference Collection

• Data from different institutions imported in BRICKS for building the reference collection

• Schema of institutions mapped to CIDOCCRM to have a common standard

• Steps– Mapping tool assisting curators in producing

an XSLT sheet transforming the XML dump to CIDOC CRM (mapping)

– XML dump transformed with the XSLT sheet and imported into BRICKS (importing)

– The curator defines the questions ashed to the user and how possible answers map to the element-property chains in CRM (configuring)

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BRICKS : on the move towards i2010

• BRICKS is addressing the i2010 goal of Access:– Accessibility, Interoperability, Multilinguism, Reuse, Rich Multimedia

Digital Content available to EU Citizens

• BRICKS technology for digital library users and content• Concrete cooperation initiatives

– TEL(The European Library) has become active member of the BRICKS Community

– A joint technical task-force is going to be established for identifying a common approach

– Preliminary studies for interoperability are very promising: a TEL-BRICKS Node will be the nexus for a full integration

– A round table is going to be arranged soon between BRICKS, TEL, MICHAEL and DELOS

– Joint workshop on the semantic interoperability todat between EPOCH, BRICKS and DELOS

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What about the future?• Large effort and EU money invested in delivering state-of-the-art

technology solutions for cultural digital libraries• Now at the crossroads for turning BRICKS technologies into real

user effective tools• Concrete benefits for the EU citizens will be gained only if these

technologies will be widely adopted • BRICKS and The European Library complement one each other in

addressing the European Digital Library objectives• Cooperation and synergies between existing digital library networks

and projects are strongly welcomed as the ONLY way for building a truly European Digital Library

Technology is worth nothing without USERS and CONTENT.

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Next steps

• Development

– Performance and Stability

– Security and DRM

– Multi-lingual queries

– 3rd Foundation Prototype

• Deployment

– Testbed

– Large-scale deployment