Executive Summary

We propose a mix of basic and applied research to understand issues and create compelling use-case demonstrations at the intersection of:

- institutional information management and digital asset management

- personal and collaborative information management

- the semantic web

We seek to enhance interoperability among asset, schemas, metadata, and services:

- across distributed individual, community, and institutional stores, and

- across value chains that provide useful services by drawing upon the assets, schemas, and metadata held in such stores

The work hinges upon collaboration among:

- MIT Lab for Computer Science
(David Karger, principal investigator)

- The Worldwide Web Consortium
(Tim Berners-Lee, co-PI; Eric Miller, lead researcher)

- MIT Libraries
(Ann Wolpert, co-PI; MacKenzie Smith, lead researcher)

- Hewlett-Packard Company
(HP Labs Bristol)

The research methodology will include establishing a research sandbox to extend the open-source DSpace system currently in Beta at MIT Libraries. We will:

- extend DSpace to greatly enhance its ability to support arbitrary schemas, and metadata, primarily through the use of RDF and semantic web techniques

- explore support for distributed stores of assets, schemas, and metadata

- implement a dissemination architecture based upon web standards, enabling services to operate upon relevant assets, schemas, and metadata within the distributed stores

- leverage the haystack schemas and user interface to manage human interactions with the personal, community, and institutional stores

To ensure compelling results and impact we will:

- establish a critical-mass, co-located team in Cambridge, MA

- ground the research by focusing upon well-defined, real-world use cases in an exemplar domain: research libraries

- selectively migrate demonstrated research results to DSpace operations

Since parallel work is underway to deploy DSpace at a number of leading research libraries, such an approach may lead to a powerful deployment channel through which emerging standards can be efficiently applied by a supportive community.

The research will be funded by invent@mit – the HP/MIT Alliance – and will be conducted over a period of three years. Alliance funding will total four million dollars.