Paper presented at the 13th European Conference on Digital Libraries

A paper titled "Functional Adaptivity for Digital Library Services in e-Infrastructures: The gCube Approach" was accepted for the 13th European Conference on Digital Libraries, ECDL 2009, held in Corfu, Greece in the period 27 September - 02 October 2009. It was presented by Fabio Simeoni (University of Strathclyde) during the Special Session on Infrastructures on 29 September 2009.

The paper considers the problem e-Infrastructures that wish to reconcile the generality of their services with the bespoke requirements of diverse user communities. In particular, it motivates the requirement of 'functional adaptivity' in gCube and translates it into the need to map service interfaces onto multiple implementations, truly alternative interpretations of the same functionality. The paper analyses two design solutions in which the alternative implementations are, respectively, full-fledged services and local components of a single service. It then associate the latter with lower development costs and increased binding flexibility, and outlines a strategy to deploy them dynamically as the payload of plugins for gCube services. The result is an infrastructure in which services exhibit multiple behaviours, know how to select the most appropriate behaviour, and can seamlessly learn new behaviours.

Bibliographic reference:
Simeoni F., Candela L., Leavens D., Pagano P., Simi M. Functional Adaptivity for Digital Library Services in e-Infrastructures: The gCube Approach, in proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, ECDL 2009, Corfu, Greece, September-October 2009, pp 51-62

More information about the event: http://www.ecdl2009.eu/