Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
1. INTRODUCTION
it provides flexible services to be integrated with
existing applications.
In addition, there exist many legacy digital
resource management systems that require inte-
gration with the emerging systems. The current
software usually provides Web Services to be in-
voked from the old systems. However, to integrate
these Web Services, it is necessary to modify the
codes and re-compile which can be very cumber-
some. So as to improve upon this practice, we
offer Mashup services as a means to support this
integration. This is because Mashup Service can
be integrated at a higher level, which reduces the
workload to some extent. It serves as a straight-
forward way to create new Web applications by
combining existing Web resources utilizing data
and Web APIs (Benslimane et al. 2008).
The software that we have developed is the
Digital Resource Management System Version 2.0
(DRMS2.0), which is an upgrade of the DRMS1.0
which was a stand-alone system that provided the
management of digital resources from ingestion,
storage, index to services. For DRMS2.0, we de-
sign it as a middleware between application layer
and network layer, which includes five clouds, a
digital resource management container and an as-
sistant tool. The five clouds provide three kinds of
services: SaaS, Mashup Services and Web services.
The SaaS services include management of digital
object identifiers and digital content. Mashup ser-
vice consists of Web APIs to be integrated in the
user interface of a Web application. Web services
provide the programmable interface to operate the
digital resources. The digital resource management
container called MenuFrame provides the Web
interfaces, role-user management, privilege man-
agement, and supports central authentication. The
assistant tool helps the user create an Institutional
Repository for the customized digital resources,
or just an empty framework for common use. The
five clouds themselves are also created by this tool.
In traditional digital resource management
systems, the content of the digital resource is
normally static after it is ingested. But from our
As institutions and organizations strive to meet
the needs of a technologically savvy society, they
are confronted with the problem of managing a
massive amount of digital resources. If they are
to meet societal needs, they must incorporate a
digital resource management system that is capable
of affording individuals an opportunity to access
their digital resources in a readily available and
useful manner. In response, many have started to
use an Institutional Repository (IR) which is an
online system for digitally collecting, preserv-
ing, and disseminating intellectual output (Smith
2002) (Institutional Repository 2010). Although
IR originates from academic fields, more and
more organizations are setting up their own IRs
that extend the original academic elements such
as institutionally defined, scholarly content, cu-
mulative and perpetual, interoperability and open
access (Johnson 2002).
Meanwhile, Cloud Computing has been boom-
ing for several years. It is an extension of Grid
Computing which emphasizes the on-demand
usage of computing powers. In comparison, Cloud
Computing focuses on higher-level services or
well-designed services. More so, Clouds are
defined as a large pool of easily usable and ac-
cessible virtualized resources (such as hardware,
development platforms and/or services) (Vaquero
et al. 2009). These resources can be dynamically
configured to adapt to variable load (scale), lead-
ing to optimum resource utilization. This pool of
resources is typically utilized on a pay-per-use
model in which guarantees are offered by the
Infrastructure Provider by means of customized
SLAs.
Overall, Cloud Computing has three advan-
tages that can help us manage digital resources.
First of all, it is a pay-per-use utility model that
decreases the cost of setting up, operating and
upgrading an Institutional Repository. Secondly,
it is scalable to deal with the massive digital re-
sources that are continuously growing. Thirdly,
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