Integration of digital repositories through federated queries using semantic technologies

Abstract

Currently, institutions store the information that they produce in digital repositories, especially those within the academic scope, such as universities and libraries. However, the lack of agreement in defining protocols, meta-data descriptions and technologies for publication has caused issues while trying to integrate repositories. Numerous alternatives have been proposed to tackle this problem, however, most of them are based on syntactical technologies, which are exclusive to the ambit of digital repositories, hampering a higher level integration(Web). In addition, much of the research done so far uses centralized approaches, which are hardly scalable and can threaten to inter-institutional independence. In this work a new distributed integration architecture is proposed, which is based on semantic technologies and federated queries. This architecture has been successfully tested to integrate a group of institutional repositories belonging to universities, demonstrating its applicability within this context.