IST-2001-33127 SciX Open, self organising repository for scientific information exchange D15: Value Added Publications Responsible author: Gudni Gudnason Co-authors: Arnar Gudnason Type: software/pilot Access: public Version: 1.0 Date: January 28, 2004
version of 9-Feb-04 09:56 page 2/19 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The work presented in this report belongs to deliverable D15 Wrapper service pilot of WP5 Value Added Publications formerly known as Value Added Wrapper Services. The output of D15 is a software pilot, which an overview of is given of in this report. It is not purpose of this report to provide documentation for Value Added Publication application, but rather to provide a statement that the Value Added Publication application has been created, provide an example of its use and highlight the features that have been implemented so far. The report will be updated as the Value Added Publication application evolves and eventually merge into the final documentation reported in D10 "Overall implementation report", which will include (1) the "as-built" architecture, (2) end user as well as (3) programmer's and integrator's documentation. RELEASE HISTORY date changes 28.1.2004 report on D15 v 1.0
version of 9-Feb-04 09:56 page 3/19 TABLE OF CONTENTS: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:...2 RELEASE HISTORY...2 TABLE OF CONTENTS:... 3 1. VALUE ADDED PUBLICATIONS... 4 2. POSITION OF VAP IN SCIX ARCHITECTURE... 6 3. VAP ARCITECTURE OVERVIEW...7 4. COLLABORATION AMONG THE VAP APPLICATIONS... 10 5. APPLICATIONS...11 5.1 CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM:...11 5.2 SYNDICATION SERVER... 15 5.3 SYNDICATION CLIENT... 18 5.4 IBRI RHEOCENTER PROTAL...19
version of 9-Feb-04 09:56 page 4/19 1. VALUE ADDED PUBLICATIONS Value Added Publication (VAP) is a Scix application that demonstrates how SciX content may be used in vertical markets or subject domains (fig. 1.). The aim of a VAP application is to provide the normal industry user with access to industry specific articles that are created by VAP operators (e.g. editors and publishers) from SciX digital archive content. The design principle for the SciX VAP application stems from the gap in information requirements by the scholarly community on one hand and the Industrial community on the other. Normally scientists are funded through their research budgets to do background and literature studies as part of their normal research where as industrial practitioners have very limited resources for similar studies of scholarly work - essentially industry practitioners require just-the-right information just in time. SciX Digital Library Service Service Integration SciX VAP SciX VAP SciX VAP Engineering Architecture Construction IT Figure 1: Moderated subject specific VAP applications that sit between the industry practitioner and SciX Digital libraries The business model underlying the SciX VAP is to create and publish articles in form of digests, reviews and summaries from the scientific content in SciX digital archives and making it available to industry practitioners in a form more suited to their specific requirements and thereby extend the reader base of scientific publications. The section below outlines some of the main characteristics of a SciX VAP application: The Operators of a VAP application are typically industry organizations, federations and associations, commercial information providers or special interests groups VAP moderated articles are targeted to industry practitioners while content in SciX Digital Libraries are more specific to the scientific and academic community VAP applications can cooperate in a in a peer-to-peer network to disseminate, aggregate or reuse content created by one VAP in another VAP. The logical architecture of the VAP handles content creation and content presentation as separate concerns. For example a content author (an
version of 9-Feb-04 09:56 page 5/19 expert) that writes about a specific domain of knowledge can make his content available to several VAP content consumers for presentation. Similarly a content consumer (e.g. an association) can aggregate and publish domain specific content from several independent VAP publishers to a single audience. SciX VAP Architect Information Portal Architecture SciX VAP SciX VAP Architect Association Construction IT Figure 2: SciX VAP application content aggregation Figure 2. Illustrates an example of cooperating VAPs. The Architect Information Portal (AIP) is subscribing to content from two separate subject specific services, the architecture subject service and the construction informatics subject service. The content is aggregated by the AIP s own SciX VAP and made available to the portal software for publication to end-users.
version of 9-Feb-04 09:56 page 6/19 2. POSITION OF VAP IN SCIX ARCHITECTURE An overview of the SciX architecture is shown below. Value Added Publications are shown to the far right in the picture. Essentially Value Added Publication is an independently hosted SciX application that interacts with the SciX services layer using XML protocols over HTTP. The main difference between the VAP application and other SciX applications (e.g. Digital library, electronic journal) is outlined below: The VAP application is using the content stored in a SciX repository to create new content from it where as other SciX application are built by assembling different services to provide functionality and storage infrastructure for digital libraries, electronic journals etc. The VAP is based on a different business model then SciX. This is because the VAPs are aimed at setting up commercial services, which will be centrally managed, and charged for (either directly or indirectly), whereas the core SciX systems will be largely selforganizing, free to use, and therefore ultimately widely distributed in order to spread costs over existing institutional infrastructures on a marginal cost basis The VAP provides collaborative authoring and versioning services to support publication of articles and a syndication mechanism do publish articles to industry end-users Other User SciX Scientific User SciX Industry User Application layer providing functionality to end user (Web/servlet based) VAP 3 rd party applicatio n 1 3rd party application 2 electronic journal conference support digital library web service administration Word/ Openoffice.org client (Optional) Value added publications XML protocols over HTTP other Metadata Harvester Business object layer providing web services to applications OAi adapter Repository Knowledge management Collections User management Reviews Annotation Discussion VAP Content Managemnt application OAi-PMH proprietary data SciX Metadata Harvester OAi-PMH data Data layer data data data data data data VAP Syndication server External 3 rd party archives (OAI-PMH compliant) Personal Society archives archives Institution archives Hosted archives RSS External VAP Figure 3: SciX Architecture overview
version of 9-Feb-04 09:56 page 7/19 3. VAP ARCITECTURE OVERVIEW An overview of the VAP architecture is shown in fig 4. The SciX VAP architecture is designed to promote flexible use case scenarios and a widely accessible system in a peer-to-peer arrangement suitable for handling varied needs of industry communities and end-user requirements. Components of the VAP application are shown in coloured boxes (fig 3.) while external applications are shown white. The architecture is based on the principles of separation of concerns; a) content creation and content presentation are handled by external applications and b) content management and content delivery are handled by VAP applications. In other words the VAP application makes no assumptions about the tools used for creating a VAP article or the format in which it is stored, nor the method or technology by which it will be presented to the end user as demonstrated in Figure 3. Industry editor, publisher Value added publications Client applications (MS-WORD, Open Office) SciX Services Repository service XML protocols over HTTP WORD DOC, HTML,XML Web client HTTP file upload SciX Content Management API System proxy Content Store Syndication server Syndication client data HTTP / XML_RPC / RSS HTTP / RSS & File Download RSS enabled Web-application, Web-portal or Web-server Industry User Figure 4: The SciX VAP software The main components of the VAP architecture are three types of applications, a Content Management system, Syndication Server and Syndication Client and an interface proxy to the SciX archive. The components are at different stages of development. They will be listed as: P - operational, publicly available. B - under development, consortium. A - alpha, under development, developers. P - planned.
version of 9-Feb-04 09:56 page 8/19 Scix Inerface proxy (SIP) [B]. The SIP handles the interaction of a VAP application with the SciX repository service. The repository service provides access to metadata and full text of scientific papers in a Digital archive. The SIP uses the repository Dublin Core compatibility to provide meta-data about scientific papers. VAP editors use the SIP to search and browse the digital archives, to read and upload papers, produce citations and bibliographic notes. More specifically the SIP provides functionality for VAP editors to: Do keyword search or build detailed searches for scientific publications based on numerous parameters Browse the digital archive (e.g. list of scientific publications, metadata etc.) by author, class and keyword Download scientific publication full text and metadata for building citations and bibliographic notes Bookmark repository scientific publications VAP editors can select a digital archive from a pre-configured registry form a range available sites. The functionality of the SIP has been implemented and is made available in the CMS application apart from the browsing function, which will also draw from the Knowledge management service. Content Management System (CMS) [A]. The CMS provides the support for maintaining edited articles, collaborative authoring and versioning and publication of articles to end-users. The CMS provides two user interfaces (UI), one for authors and the other for managing the CMS. The author UI is called Workspace Manager (WM). In the WM the authors manage their private article repository, user access permissions and publication of articles. Similarly the CMS manager UI manages CMS system central resources e.g. users, roles, access privileges and the public repository that can be access by all users. The CMS includes a logical repository structure consisting of nested collections and files similar to OS file systems, locking mechanism to implement chechout/checkin functionality for collaborative authoring and centrally managed access control to namespaces, collections and files. The VAP repository consists of three types of namespaces, an owner private namespace where users store their personal articles and documents, a project namespace where sharable articles are stored and a public namespace where syndicated content feeds and downloaded public documents are stored. The CMS basic functionality has been implemented, but some features have still to be implemented as part of the user interface, while some are available in a developer version others are only partially finished. Syndication Server [B]. The Syndication server consists off a Manager Web application and an HTTP XML-RPC server application. The Manger application handles the management of content delivery. The Content delivery is subscription based and automated by a syndication schedule (e.g. when, where, what). The Syndication server constantly scans the CMS repository for published updates and new articles. When such updates are available the Syndication server sends the designated client a notification of an available update in the form of an XML-RPC
version of 9-Feb-04 09:56 page 9/19 request. Notifications of updates are formatted as RSS channel headlines. Upon receiving a request to download the clients downloads the published RSS channels containing the information about the new and updated articles and optionally uploads the actual full text articles for publication to end-users or further processing. The syndication server is available in beta version to be released. Syndication Client [B]. The Syndication Client is HTTP server application in the P2P network that listens for XML-RPC requests. When updates are available the syndication server sends the client an notification in a XML-RPC request. The client responds by calling an XML-RPC method on the Syndication server to upload a RSS channel that contains information on updates. The syndication client can then, depending on the VAP configuration, store the RSS channel in the CMS repository and/or store the RSS channel to a file where it can be picked up by any RSS enabled application for presentation. Depending on preferences the client can optionally retrieve the actual articles being advertised in the RSS channel from the Syndication server by successive XML-RPC method calls and persist them in the CMS public repository namespace. The syndication client is available in beta version to be released.
version of 9-Feb-04 09:56 page 10/19 4. COLLABORATION AMONG THE VAP APPLICATIONS The SciX VAP framework is based on a syndication model. The SciX VAP exist in a peer-topeer network where the content delivery mechanism allows communication of content between separate SciX VAP applications and publication applications like Web servers. A VAP application may contain both or one of a syndication server for delivering content and a syndication client for receiving and storing syndicated content locally. The server client applications can cooperate in a side-by-side configuration (co-exist) on a single machine or as independent applications on separate machines. The server and client can schedule automatic update of content over the network between any VAP peers. Scheduling is controlled by a contract that exists between a server and a client. The contract consists of a subscription, which describes the business relation ship between the two, the terms of the contract and a catalogue, which describes the content being subscribed to. Both the syndication server and client share the same data repository as the CMS, which must be present also for the syndication process to operate smoothly. Since the content contained in the VAP is fundamentally document oriented (e.g. Word documents, HTML and XML documents) it is presented to publication services without any consideration of how it is eventually displayed to the end-users. Any web-application capable of accepting RSS news feeds can easily publish content from any VAP and reformat retrieved content based on metadata information supplied in the RSS headline to comply with visual look and feel of the web-application front end. Figure 5. Demonstrates an example the cooperation of two VAP applications on separate systems. SYSTEM 1 SYSTEM 2 Content Menagement System Manage content Syndication Server Discover updates 1)Notify update 2) Send RSS channel and articles INTERNET Content Syndication Menagement Client System 1) Accept update 2) Receive RSS Store Store channel and Manage RSS RSS articles channel content channel and file articles CMS Repository OS Filesystem CMS Repository RSS file RSS enabled application Figure 5: VAP application cooperation
version of 9-Feb-04 09:56 page 11/19 5. APPLICATIONS In the following section, screenshots of the applications are demonstrated. 5.1 CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM: Figure 6: User Management Interface Figure 7: VAP Search SciX digital library
version of 9-Feb-04 09:56 page 12/19 Figure 8: Viewing search details Figure 9: Downloading document metadata and full text document
version of 9-Feb-04 09:56 page 13/19 Figure 10:Managing profiles for SciX digital libraries
version of 9-Feb-04 09:56 page 14/19 Figure 11:User workspace version 0.6
version of 9-Feb-04 09:56 page 15/19 5.2 SYNDICATION SERVER Figure 12: Managing syndication clients.
version of 9-Feb-04 09:56 page 16/19 Figure 13: Add new subscription for syndication client. Figure 14: Manage subscription content catalogues.
version of 9-Feb-04 09:56 page 17/19 Figure 15: Syndication server consol log - servicing client threads
version of 9-Feb-04 09:56 page 18/19 5.3 SYNDICATION CLIENT The Syndication client doesn t have a user interface of it own. The samples below are screen dumps of the consol log. Figure 16: Syndication client consol log
version of 9-Feb-04 09:56 page 19/19 5.4 IBRI RHEOCENTER PROTAL The example below is an example to an end-user RSS enabled application. RSS files are downloaded directly into the portal file directory from the syndication client. The portal software displays and rendered XML formatted RSS channel automatically. Figure 17: IBRI rheocenter portal homepage