ARIADNE - Digital Library Architecture

Abstract

We describe our approach for acquiring, preserving, organizing and disseminating information in a digital library of news publications.

The digital publishing group at the Informatics Department of FCUL studies new paradigms for processing heterogeneous information in organizations, combining multiple information processing technologies under a common framework. In our current project, ARIADNE, developed jointly with PÚblico, S.A.[2], a national daily newspaper, we are building a new digital publishing infrastructure where all the information used and produced by journalists is organized in a common database. From the information in this digital library, we generate publications in digital format.

A main concern of the project is to build and maintain a large multimedia data repository, holding various collections of documents, from newsfeeds to newspaper articles, to databases of people, places and events. For some of the collections we only keep meta-data of various forms (from links to indexes and classification schemes).

We find that some of the new publications we are developing are taking us into a new publishing paradigm where the notion of edition disappears. The same information item is reformatted and published in multiple forms, and accessed as part of information collections that do not constitute publications in the usual sense. As a result, we are studying robust forms for classifying this information so it may be reused in the future and ways to preserve its current presentation and organization.

Organizing topic collections is another investigation topic associated with the preservation of information [1].