Workshop Program Available

Workshop objectives

Today’s information society is confronted with the data deluge issue and is requesting for Digital Libraries that are capable to effectively serve broader and challenging scenarios. Information seekers are willing to have immediate and effective access to human knowledge that – differently from the past – very often is produced and disseminated through heterogeneous sources. Such scenarios call for the development of Very Large Digital Libraries (VLDLs), which are “very large” with respect to various aspects including the number and type of information objects and collections to be made available, the number of users to be served, the number of interoperability issues to be resolved, the number of “systems” to be federated, the number of heterogeneities to be reconciled. Although there is no consensus yet on what a VLDL is, there is a bunch of research issues that comes in tandem with VLDLs and that are worth to be discussed.

Scholarly communication itself has changed a lot during the last years and is today driven by “open access” and “enhanced publications” having datasets (e.g., images, videos, XML/RDF files, Linked Data, web sites, databases, queries, benchmark files) as first class citizens among the research outcomes, on par of papers. The fourth edition of the Workshop will focus on the problems emerging from the marriage of “very-large” Digital Libraries and “very-large” Data Archives, in an attempt to manage, combine and interlink datasets with publications. Such problems include metadata definition, annotations, search, preservation, provenance, metadata aggregation, etc.

Motivations and Goals

The long-term goal of this workshop is to provide researchers, vendors, practitioners, application developers and users operating in the field of VLDLs with a forum fostering a constructive confront on the issues they face and the solutions they develop. This edition will be targeting the problematic surfacing when addressing the needs of scientific communities for managing content from very-large Data Archives and Digital Libraries.

Expected outcomes and intended audience

Research on VLDLs opens up novel and actual scenarios, where researchers have to confront with foundational, organisational and systemic challenges in contexts having scalability, interoperability and sustainability as focal points. The workshop expects to produce an actual picture of the state of the art approaches and solutions that researchers and practitioners active in the VLDL field have developed with respect to the workshop topics.