John Burns: Position Statement

Position Statements

Architecture Matters:

Digital Libraries in general are in transition. Too many are based on monolithic web-apps where the content, the indexing, the search technology, the presentation model, access control, and everything else is tightly entwined in an inflexible structure that cannot move with changing demands. And too many content providers find themselves having to repeatedly migrate to new platforms, and planning the next migration even before they have completed the last. The lesson being re-learned, as it was learned long ago in software engineering, is to separate the content, the rules, and the presentation.

Moreover, there is increasing realization that much value is derived from the inclusion of both formal, canonical content and grey content — user contributed content that complements, expands , clarifies or links the canonical content. This is especially true in mathematics, where perhaps the only people able to meaningfully contribute to the content are the practitioners themselves.

In the case of the DML a green-field site is being advocated, and the content base will not be so huge that the implementation must be optimized to the n^th degree. We should therefore take pains to ensure that the content is exposed via standardized access methods, and that any GUIs provided use those methods. We should ensure that the content is machine accessible, and especially that the annotations and user commentary is as accessible as the primary content. Why? Because rigorous representation of the core content is likely to be provided in user annotation and open linked data, not in the originals.

Therefore we need to ensure that architecturally the content store supports a rich (and dynamic) representation repertoire, rich relationships, and rich attributes and access control.

Almost needless to say, the access primitives should be rich enough to support existing standards and general enough to support emerging ones, both humans and machine oriented.

Arguably, the GUI itself should be outsourced, since user experience (UX) is complex, messy, and arcane. Such a separation would also ensure that the integrity of the abstraction layers was not compromised.