Building the InfoBus:
A Review of Technical Choices in the Stanford Digital Library Project
Andreas Paepcke
Stanford University
Abstract
Our approach to digital library infrastructure is based on the premise
that DLs will not just be online catalogs and collections, but that
they will be made up of geographically wide-spread, interoperating
services that support users in their tasks. Our infrastructure, called
the 'InfoBus' is based on CORBA distributed object technology. We
build proxy objects to provide uniform interfaces to online services
that present different interaction models and access protocols. For
this talk, we will select several aspects of our digital library, and
discuss the tradeoffs we made. First, we explain how we distributed
user interface functionality among clients and services. Second, we
present our experience with an object-centric information retrieval
protocol we developed for the project. Third, we explain how metadata
plays an important role in DL interoperability, and why existing
metadata representations fall short when used for digital
libraries. Finally, we will explain how user traditions and
expectations have impacted our designs at a deeply technical level.