Enabling Services in Knowledge Infrastructures: The DRIVER Experience

A knowledge infrastructure is a basic physical and organisational framework which provides facilities needed by scientists to share, use and create knowledge. Several discussions are currently on-going on how knowledge infrastructures might be built and a few attempts already exists towards their realization, e.g. architectural models, data resource models, and functionality provision. As a contribution to this discussion, this paper introduces DRIVER, an ongoing European funded project aiming to implement the Knowledge Infrastructure concept by relying on the experiences and guidelines accumulated in the Digital Library Architecture research area. The paper focuses, in particular, on the capability of DRIVER infrastructure to support the dynamic joining of new resources, i.e. repositories and services, and the delivering of functionality based on these resources. Central to the infrastructure are Enabling Services in charge of both "' 'welcoming' new services, i.e. enabling them to cooperate with the others, and 'orchestrating' them, i.e. telling them what to do in order to maximize system Quality of Service.