D-NET Open Source Software Toolkit

D-Net, is a Open Source Software Toolkit capable of enabling a running environment where data and service providers can (i) find the tools to aggregate heterogeneous OAI-PMH compliant Institutional Repositories into uniform shared Information Spaces, and (ii) dynamically build, modify and customize their Digital Library (DL) applications to operate over such Spaces. The technology supports a Service-oriented e-infrastructure, where distributed and shared resources are implemented as standard Web Services and applications consist of sets of interacting services. The current implementation of D-Net offers functionality services required to build distributed aggregation systems and DL end-user applications. Aggregation systems enable the construction of uniform Information Spaces of metadata records to be harvested from possibly heterogeneous Institutional Repositories. Important in this context are Store Services, Index Services and Aggregation Services, which offer advanced tools for OAI-PMH harvesting, cleaning and integrating metadata records according to target metadata record formats. The resulting Information Spaces can then be accessed via an arbitrary number of DL applications built by service providers by combining D-Net services such as Recommendation, Collection, Browsing, User Interfaces and others. Key features of D-Net are the scalability and the openness of its infrastructure instances.