Marek Niezgodka:Talk
Marek Niezgodka: Decoupling is a golden rule - not only for software architecture
ABSTRACT
One of the golden rules of software architecture design is to decouple different functionalities and distribute capacities, so that a single party is involved in one thing only. Currently, individual DMLs are scattered and often small, and there is little chance it will change over time. Local DMLs usually have good qualifications and experience in content digitisation, metadata curation and management, but may lack IT resources to develop modern, efficient and scalable software infrastructures. Based on DRIVER international infrastructure, as well as EuDML experience, we propose building up a community and rules around an infrastructure, allowing WDML to offer proper aggregation and federation of the DMLs over the world. An important positive lesson we have learnt, is the one resulting from DRIVER guidelines specification: providing a common denominator for the scattered community proved very successful both in practical terms as well as being inspiring. It also proved that building sustainable distributed infrastructures and managing large collections is more an IT than a library task. This as well applies to development of tools that may be shared among the DMLs. Such an initiative should not be limited to aggregation of individual collections, but offer rich tools, a future-proof development environment, and infrastructural support to the involved parties (besides the end-users), and possibly offer DML hosting and long term preservation where required or appropriate.
