Project Title
A testbed DIgital Library Infrastructure on Grid ENabled Technology

Start date
September 1, 2004

Duration
36 months

Effort
1024 person months

Cost
8,9M EUR

European Community Contribution
6,3M EUR

Administrative and Financial Coordinator
ERCIM of Sophia Antipolis, France

Technical and Scientific Coordinator
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche-I.S.T.I. (Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione "Alessandro Faedo"), of Pisa, Italy

Number of partners: 14

Objectives
DILIGENT will create an advanced test-bed for the creation of digital libraries that support the collaboration of virtual organisations. Additional project objectives are: i) to open up Grid technology to a broader range of research and industrial communities; ii) to broaden the diffusion of digital libraries by supporting a cost-effective digital library operational model; iii) to promote cross-fertilization between the digital library and Grid technology domains that will foster advances in both the areas.

Innovation
The merging of Grid and digital library technologies will result in an unprecedented level of functionality and will lay the foundations for next generation collaboration environments.

Technical approach
DILIGENT will exploit the results of the EGEE project, which will deliver a Grid production infrastructure shared by a large number of European organisations. DILIGENT will first enrich this infrastructure with the necessary features for handling an open and "on-the-fly" modifiable set of services as required by the DL application framework. It will then add specific services for providing access to content sources, implementing typical DL functions and supporting existing applications implemented by third-parties.

Test-bed
The test-bed will be built by integrating Grid and Digital Library technologies.

Applications
Two complementary real-life application scenarios will serve to demonstrate and validate the test-bed: one from the culture heritage domain and the other from the environmental e-Science domain.

International aspects
The first user community is composed by representatives of leading organizations that operate in the environmental sector; the second consists of scholars, distributed all over the world working together in a three-year project to merge the medical, humanity, social science and communication research areas.