Towards Interoperability in Digital Libraries Overview and Selected Highlights of the Stanford Digital Library Project

We outline the five main research thrusts of the Stanford Digital Library project, and we describe technical details for two specific efforts that have been realized in prototype implementations. First, we describe how we employ distributed object technology to cope with interoperability among emerging digital library services. In particular, we describe how we use CORBA objects as wrappers to handle differences in service interaction models, and we sketch an information access protocol that takes advantage of distributed object environments. The second effort we cover is InterPay, a framework and protocol for payment among autonomous services. The framework addresses interoperability problems in online payment by cleanly separating information access protocols , payment and charging policies, and the actual mechanics of individual financial transactions. Descriptors: Digital libraries, distributed objects, CORBA, ILU, clientserver architecture, interoperability, protocol transformation, Z39.50, electronic payment, electronic commerce, InterPay, InfoBus, annotations, SOAPs, third-party ratings.