Digital Libraries and the Open Information Locator project

DSTC Tech Report 34) Resource Discovery is the term commonly used to refer to the exercise of locating, accessing, retrieving, and managing relevant resources (eg information and services) for a user from widely distributed heterogeneous networks. The Resource Discovery Unit of the Research Data Network Cooperative Research Centre is working on tools and technologies which make these tasks easier in the Open Information Locator (OIL) project. This paper aims to present and discuss some of the central issues in the area of Resource Discovery that the OIL project is addressing. It also aims to position the OIL project with respect to related research fields including Information Retrieval, Distributed Databases, and Digital Libraries. 1 Global Resource Discovery 1.1 Resource Discovery: a definition Resource Discovery is a multidisciplinary domain (as shown in Figure 1). Researchers in each of these disciplines have differing views on what resource discovery is. The resulting polysemic definition of resource discovery has led to some misconceptions as to its scope and responsibilities. The Resource Discovery Unit of the DSTC has, for very obvious reasons, attempted to address this problem by giving a definition of the field [RDU95a]. Rather than take a technology oriented view, this definition takes a broad view of resource discovery. It describes resource discovery from the perspective of the stakeholders, namely users and the discovery of resources from service providers in large heterogeneous distributed networks. The full definition of resource discovery covers: • Resource. Any real or conceptual, static or dynamic, object that can be identified. It may exist for a short period of time, or be persistent. • Discovery. The finding and retrieving of resources that are relevant to the user of the system. Finding involves locating resources and presenting these to the user as a possi-