Architecture of Semantic Digital Libraries

The main motivation of this chapter was to gather existing requirements and solutions, and to present a generic architectural design of semantic digital libraries. This design is meant to answer a number of requirements, such as interoperability or ability to exchange resources and solutions, and set up the foundations for the best practices in the new domain of semantic digital libraries.

We start by presenting the library from different high-level perspectives, i.e., user (see Sect. 2) and metadata (see Sect. 1) perspective; this overview narrows the scope and puts emphasis on certain aspects related to the system perspective, i.e., the architecture of the actual digital library management system. We conclude by presenting the system architecture from three perspectives: top-down layered architecture (see Sect. 3), vertical architecture of core services (see Sect. 4), and stack of enabling infrastructures (see Sect. 5); based upon the observations and evaluation of the contemporary state of the art presented in the previous sections, these last three subsections will describe an in-depth model of the digital library management system.