The New Jersey Institute of Technology's
Electronic Theses & Dissertations Project

Title:	Digital libraries and middleware technology
Author:	Qasim, Muhammad Umar
View Online:	njit-etd2005-008 (iv, 51 pages ~ 4.0 MB pdf)
Department:	Department of Information Systems
Degree:	Master of Science
Program:	Information Systems
Document Type:	Thesis
Advisory Committee:	Bieber, Michael (Committee chair) Gagnon, Stéphane (Committee member) Oria, Vincent (Committee member)
Date:	2005-01
Keywords:	Digital libraries Middleware architecture
Availability:	Unrestricted
Abstract:	Digital libraries deliver personalized knowledge directly to their users, without being restricted to the contents of a physical library. In a digital library information from any online source can be managed and shared, making more knowledge available to users than before. The information sharing is achieved by integrating many autonomous heterogeneous systems available. The challenge is to provide users with the ability to transparently access digital library contents in spite of the heterogeneity among the information sources. Research communities have proposed several approaches to accomplish the system integration in digital libraries. In this thesis, the working of currently employed approaches was assessed and a new ontology based approach is proposed. This approach utilizes the semantic web enables web services to implement the middleware for digital library integration. Ontology based digital library integration will provide a machine processable mechanism and will overcome the shortcomings of earlier approaches.