Digital library and Distance Learning Web service based Middleware:
Specifications and Applications
Hajar Kashfi
hkashfi@ce.aut.ac.ir
CEIT Department
Islamic Azad University of Qazvin
Qazvin,Iran
Abstract
Current efforts for next generation Digital
library and e-learning architectures are aiming for a
transition from these systems as integrated, centrally
controlled systems to dynamic configurable
federation of library and educational services and
information collections. So, developers adapt their
systems to novel technology trends and developments
including technologies like Web services and the Grid
as well as the success of new paradigms like Peer-to-
Peer networking; and also, Service oriented
Architectures. Current systems have major drawbacks
because of their limitations in scalability, availability,
distribution of computing power and storage system,
as well as sharing information between users that
contribute in these systems. Proposing a grid DLEL
middleware ,we described how some new
technologies including agent, web service and Grid
and emerging standards can be applied to Digital
library and E-learning.
1.Introduction
One of the main objectives of digital library and e-
learning systems is to make information accessible
for any type of users. A digital library(DL) is a
distributed technology environment which
dramatically reduces barriers to the creation,
dissemination, manipulation, storage, integration, and
reuse of information by individuals and groups[1].on
the other hand ,E-learning (EL) could be regarded as
the process of learning with the use of Telematics that
is the combination of telecommunication, information
and multimedia technology and its services [2].
Both Digital Library and E-Learning systems have
been topics of increasing interest in recent years.
Users who are interested in such systems are daily
Mohammda Reza Razzazi
razzazi@ce.aut.ac.ir
CEIT Department
Amirkabir University of technology
Tehran,Iran
increase. These users have many different interests
and objectives and they will need to access to a huge
amount of information. Therefore, a successful
system will be one that addresses all these issues for
all type of users across the world. Such a system
should be scalable, available, interoperable,
extensible, and adaptable and indeed it should be
based on novel technologies. Since such systems are
very huge, many organizations and institutes can
contribute in the construction of these systems [3]. So
the development costs of these systems will highly
decrease. These organizations can cooperate under
some policies to reach their common objectives.
Here, we need a middleware for uniform access to all
theses resources belonging to different administration
areas. Also, an infrastructure is needed that insure
availability, scalability, security, extensibility and
interoperability for implementing such distributed
systems. Each organization should be able to reuse
functionalities and services as well other resources
that are provided by other organizations. This paper
reports the efforts that have been done to develop an
DLEL grid middleware. By proposing the use of grid
technology as scalable, flexible, coordinated and
secure resource sharing among geographically
distributed individuals and institutions [4] in the
context of e-learning, we are able to address
interoperability, distribution and sharing concerns.
Our middleware focused on Grid as well as using
agent [5] and web service [6] technologies to provide
developers an integrated infrastructure facilitating
digital library(DL) and E-learning(EL) system
development. Meanwhile, by implementing our
middleware based on web service technology, we are
able to reuse functionalities. This way, many service
providers and content providers can contribute in
developing a very large scale integrated e-learning
system. The reminder of this paper is structured as in
the following: section 2 gives some background
information in Grid technology, section 3 describes
web services. In section 3, there is some information
in the field of web services. In section 4 next
generation digital library and e-learning have been
introduced. In section 5 the convergence of grid
,digital library and e-learning systems are discussed.
In section 6 Digital library and e-learning standards
and specifications are exposed. Section 7 discusses
our proposed middleware architecture, and finally,
section 8 contains the conclusion.
2.Grid Technology
Grid is coordinate resource sharing and problem
solving in dynamic multi-institutional virtual
organizations [7. An important issue that should be
mentioned is that: “the sharing that we are concerned
with is not primarily file exchange but rather direct
access to computers, software data, and other
resources” [4]. This sharing is necessarily highly
controlled and under some sharing rules. A set of
individuals and/or institutions defined by such
sharing rules form Virtual Organizations (VOs). An
actual organization can participate in one or more
VOs by sharing some or all of its resources. This
resource sharing is conditional: each resource owner
makes resources available, subject to constraints on
when, where and what can be done [4].
The background concept in grid is not new. As a real
of fact, the collaboration and sharing of resources in a
geographically distributed environment is an idea
existed since the computer domain originated. In grid,
people will be able to easily access to unlimited
resources connected through the Internet.
Mechanisms for creating, managing, and exchanging
information among entities called grid services. The
next generation of scientific experiments and studies,
popularly called as e-Science [8], will be carried out
by communities of researchers from different
organizations that span national and international
boundaries. Grid computing [7] enables aggregation
and sharing of resources through by bringing together
communities with common objectives and creating
virtual organizations [4]. Data Grids have evolved to
tackle the twin challenges of large datasets and
multiple data repositories at distributed locations in
data-intensive computing environments [9].
Current e-learning systems are very limit; for
example, it is vastly impossible to compute, photo-
realistic visualizations in real-time and display the
computation result on a remote screen [10] with the
advanced functionality of an e-learning grid, students
could be provided with the possibility to search,
visualize and accomplish other high computational e-
learning services in an effective way.
3.Web Services
Internet is now almost service oriented and based on
messaging and standards for XML interfaces to
enable coordinate use of distributed resources. This
leads to high level of interoperability in such
heterogonous distributed environment. As a result, the
basic concept and building block for internet
computing becomes the Web service. A service in this
context is a network-enabled entity that provides
some capabilities.[11]
Service-based architectures take legacy application
functionality and expose it to the internet in a reliable,
highly available, scalable, flexible, manageable, and
secure manner, easy and reliable internet-based
method to create and access learning.
Web Service technology has emerged as a new
paradigm of distributed computing. They are layered
on the top of standard transfer protocols for
transmitting messages that currently, the most
common ones are the XML-based specification
SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), UDDI
(Universal Description, Discovery and Integration),
and WSDL (Web Service Description Language)
[12]. This concept is illustrated in figure-1. A web
service is a stand alone software component that has a
unique URI (Uniform Resource Identifier).
Web services present another alternative distributed
computing infrastructure which is strongly promoted
as a preferable one in contrast with the use of
distributed object middlewares such as Java RMI or
CORBA [12].
3.1.Grid services
A Grid can be defined as a layer of networked
services that allow users single sign-on access to a
distributed collection of computing, data and
application resources. Grid services allow the entire
collection to be seen as a seamless information
processing system that the user can access from any
location [13]. A Grid Service is a Web Service which
conforms to a set of conventions (interfaces and
behaviors) that define how a client interacts with a
Grid Service. Therefore, Grid Services are standard
Web Services with improved characteristics.
Two advantages of web services framework that are
mentioned in [7] as important reasons for using web
services in Grid are: First, the need to support the
dynamic discovery and composition of services in
heterogeneous environments. Second, the widespread
adoption of web services mechanisms means that a
framework based on web services can exploit
numerous tools and extant services.
Figure1. Web Service technologies
4.Next Generation Digital library and E-
Learning Systems
As it has mentioned before, according to the huge
amount of data being stored and communicated, and
also increasing number of users interested in DL and
EL systems, new architectures of these systems
should be able to address issues such as scalability,
flexibility, interoperability, availability and
heterogeneity. Next generation DLs should enable
transparent access to distributed data sources, ensure
communication and possible collaborations with
scientists in other disciplines facing similar problems,
define an open scalable middleware architecture to
build on top of existing and future archives to
facilitate interoperability, and finally provide an
environment as flexible as possible and self–
extensible[14].
In the area of digital library, few efforts have been
done to use novel technologies in these architectures.
One progressive effort in this area is arco project[14].
Arco is a digital library storage project faced several
challenges, such as the availability of peta-scale
storage, seamless spanning of storage cluster,
administration and utilization of distributed storage
and computing resources, safety and stability of data
transfer, scalability of the whole system, automatic
discovery and monitoring of metadata, etc. It can be
inferred that the efforts in Arco project just cover the
storage aspect of DL; however by using novel
technologies like web services we would be able to
reach more flexible and scalable architecture for these
kinds of systems by dividing large systems to
interconnected and interactive services.
On the other hand, in e-learning systems [15], recent
efforts concentrate on the reuse of application
functionalities. However most of these efforts in e-
learning such as [16] have been focused on the reuse
of learning material, a few of these researches have
tried to introduce web service as a preferable
technology in this area [10]. Some E-learning systems
use advantages of new features offered by Web
services such as integration of heterogeneous
applications, publicity of available services, etc. As
the adoption of this new technology increases, it will
become necessary to offer intermediary platforms that
make it easier to find and locate services and
composing new services from the existing ones [17].
The success of e-learning has promoted the
proliferation of different kinds of e-learning-related
software applications [17]. Next generation e-learning
systems will use Web services that can match learning
content to user context in a way that provides a
customized, personalized experience. Information
retrieval (IR) functions that serve a critical role in
many e-leaning systems can be distributed or their
functions be made available through the web services
framework [18]. Also, by using web services,
developers can provide the flexibility a learner needs
in tertiary education in which many institutions offer
courses for education [15].
5.Grid, Digital library and e-learning
convergence
In contrast with current applications which may use
high performance computing as a secondary task,
modern systems can use novel technologies such as
grid and parallel computing as well as web services to
reach interactive, collaborative and reality based
learning environments [28].
By proposing the use of grid technology, many
service providers and content providers can
participate in various VOs. Using the concept of
virtual organization in Grid, we can effectively group
users and organizations especially for cooperative
learning and participating in digital library
instruction. Organizations and institutes that
contribute in developing such a system can share their
resources and services forming different VOs. These
organizations can cooperate under some policies to
reach their common objectives. Here, we need a
middleware for uniform access to all theses resources
that belong to different administrative areas.
Additionally, an infrastructure is needed that insure
availability, scalability, security, extensibility and
interoperability for implementing such distributed
systems. Each organization should be able to reuse
functionalities and services as well other resources
that are provided by other organizations.
6.DLEL Standards and specifications
Everyone knows the role of standards in transmitting
and receiving data. Just like other areas, standards
have changed Digital library and e-learning systems
to reach more stable status. Interoperability among
digital library, and also e-learning, content and system
components is a key factor in successful
implementation of these environments. Recently,
there have been several interoperability specifications
and standards of development and adoption that are
being launched by a number of organizations and
consortiums[19].
Now a day, there are many organizations join together
to promote globally scalable solutions for digital
library and e-learning environments. Such solutions
cannot exist without standards anymore than the
Internet can exist without standards such as TCP, IP,
HTTP, and HTML.By means of well defined and
widely adopted standards, some goals of digital
library and e-learning environments can be reached in
a more convenient way; for instance, we are
prevented from lock-in to particular vendors and
products; costs are lowered ; standardized methods of
interoperability eliminate the need to write
proprietary interfaces to many different products;
standards allow content to be produced in a single
format to be used by any delivery system; standards
can lead to more choice of products and also make
the results more portable; large storehouses of
reusable content are accessible, by reducing the need
to develop to multiple systems, and by allowing to
create modular content that can be more easily
updated and maintained. In general, the purpose of all
these interoperability standards is to provide
standardized data structures and communications
protocols for digital and e-learning objects and cross-
system workflows. users of theses systems can
purchase content and system components from
multiple vendors, based on their quality and
appropriateness, with confidence that they will work
together effectively [19]. Standards are being
specified and implemented in several ways: Data
models with XML and other bindings, Web-service
architectures that rely on W3C protocols such as
SOAP, WebDAV, and XQuery, and APIs with
JavaScript and Java™ implementations.
7.DLEL Middleware
Our middleware has built on the assumption that
typical digital library and e-learning systems are
collections of activities or processes that interact with
users and suitably chosen content. This enables us to
subdivide the main functionality of these systems into
a number of stand-alone applications, which can then
be realized individually or in groups as Web services.
Web services, on the other hand, are offered by a
number of providers. These providers can cooperate
under some policies in the form of some grid VOs to
reach their common objectives. We proposed a
middleware for uniform access to all theses resources
that belong to different administration areas. Many
service providers and content providers can
contribute in developing a very large scale integrated
digital library and e-learning system. The content
provider in the simplest case would be a user that
shares her information with other users.
DLEL additional services
E-Learning basic Services
Digital Library basic Services
Grid core services
Figure2. DLEL Layers
On the other hand, since digital library and e-learning
systems have many common objectives, requirements
and specifications; we developed a middleware that
can support services for both of these two systems at
the same time. In both of these two systems, agents
play a great role in implementing services such that
they can response to users in an effective manner. So
we have implemented our middleware using agent
technology, while we tried to represent each agent as
a web service in our architecture. Our middleware is a
multi agent system which represents grid core
services for resource sharing and other basic services
for digital library and e-learning, all at the same time.
Each agent in this middleware is created, deployed
and published as a web service.
DL and EL basic services layers are the heart of this
DLEL grid middleware. In these layers, agents
represent basic services for digital library and e-
learning systems using other agents that exist in grid
core services layer. Using these agents users are able
to access and share all types of information including
papers, magazines, e-books, etc. with other users. As
a real of fact except sharing other resources(hardware
resources such as CPU Power and storage media),
any user can contribute in publishing digital content
in this system. On the other hand any organization
can publish its digital content for its members as well
as other organizations. In these two layers, basic
functionalities of digital library and e-learning system
are provided. There are multiple agents that cooperate
with each other to perform desired services. In
figure.2 some details of this architecture and its
agents has been shown.
By using our middleware, different organization and
institutes will be able to cooperate with each other to
create a large scale distributed digital library and
learning environment. Using core services that are
provided in this middleware, any type of users can
join to the grid, and use its services. But it is
important to notice that this middleware just provide
basic service for users. Organizations that aim to
create a complete library and educational
environment can use this middleware to structure
their resources and to cooperate with other
organizations that exist in the Grid. Then they are
able to create their own additional services and
publish them to others as web services.
8. Conclusion
Our middleware builds on the assumption that typical
digital library and e-learning systems are collections
of activities or processes that interact with users and
suitably chosen content. This enables us to subdivide
the main functionality of these systems into a number
of stand-alone applications, which can then be
realized individually or in groups as Web services.
Web services, on the other hand, are offered by a
number of providers. These providers can cooperate
under some policies in the form of some VOs to reach
their common objectives. We proposed a middleware
for uniform access to all theses resources that belong
to different administration areas. We described how
new technologies including agent, web service and
Grid and emerging standards can be applied to Digital
library and E-learning. Leveraging these technologies
structure digital library and e-learning environment
can yield significant benefits. In this paper we
proposed an integrated agent based middleware
architecture for digital library and e-learning on the
Grid. Convergence of three major technologies to
proposing a middleware for creating large scale
Digital library and e-learning systems including
agent, web services and the grid help us to address all
issues that have not been addressed by current
architectures yet. Using a multi agent system in which
all agents have a high degree of autonomy different
grid and DLEL services have been effectively
deployed in our middleware architecture.
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