Intelligent digital libraries and tailored services

摘要

A next generation of intelligent information systems will emerge from recent digital library (DL) research. One aspect of this is based on intelligent technologies and applications in the DL area. Another aspect is based on advances in DL theory and related progress toward improved quality and integration. Together, these two aspects facilitate automation and empower users. Recent progress toward these goals, and the rich set of future possibilities in this regard, can be understood most clearly in the eScience context. Scientific research produces large amounts of complex, numeric content. A new class of DLs with supporting services for such content is vital to advancing scientific practice. Intelligent services also are needed to automate scientific workflows. Simulation environments are especially well suited for automation with digital libraries. The SimDL framework generates simulation-supporting DL instances. This framework includes a set of service implementations, a software toolkit, formal definitions of services and content, and processes for producing workflows of services and layers. Integrating such DL instances within a scientific research infrastructure leads to the automation of many routine tasks and to more intelligent services. This gives a glimpse of the future of more intelligent information systems.