Digital libraries are an integration of complex computer and information systems that could benefit from a formal approach to design. There are various design aspects to consider in a digital library; a crucial aspect is security. Security often is a requirement in digital libraries that should be considered during the design process and not as an add-on feature. 5S provides a DL modeling framework, to define all the aspects of a digital library. It covers the different formats and types of digital objects stored, how they are grouped and organized, what sequence of operations occur in the digital library, how the objects will be represented, and who is part of the digital library community. However, the 5S descriptive language (5SL) previously did not cover the essential security requirements in a digital library. The goal of this research is to extend the 5S framework to describe the security requirements in digital library. An XML schema was developed to describe the necessary security requirements in a digital library, and some of the essential features of the digital library design. This work explains the key security requirements needed in a digital library from the 5S perspective and how the framework can be extended to include these requirements. The extended 5SL was applied to a case study on the Egyptian University Libraries Consortium. / Master of Science

With the enormous amount of information being created digitally or converted to digital formats and made available through Digital Libraries (DLs), there is a strong demand for building tailored DL services to attend the preferences and needs of diverse targeted communities. However,construction and adaptation of such services takes significant effort when not assisted by methodologies, tools, and environments that support the complete life cycle of DL development,including requirements gathering, conceptual modeling, rapid prototyping, and code generation/reuse. With current systems, these activities are only partially supported, generally in an uncorrelated way that may lead to inconsistencies and incompleteness. Moreover, such existing approaches are not buttressed by comprehensive and formal foundations and theories. To address these issues we describe the development, implementation, and deployment of a new generic digital library generator yielding implementations of digital library services from models of DL "societies" and "scenarios". The distinct aspects of our solution are: 1) an approach based on a formal, theoretical framework; 2) use of state-of-the-art database and software engineering techniques such as domain-specific declarative languages, scenario-synthesis, and componentized and model-driven architectures; 3) analysis centered on scenario-based design and DL societal relationships; 4) automatic transformations and mappings from scenarios to workflow designs and from these to Java implementations; and 5) special attention paid to issues of simplicity of implementation, modularity, reusability, and extensibility. We demonstrate the feasibility of the approach through a number of examples. / Master of Science

Digital libraries (DLs) are complex information systems and therefore demand formal foundations lest development efforts diverge and interoperability suffers. In this dissertation, we propose the fundamental abstractions of Streams, Structures, Spaces, Scenarios, and Societies (5S), which allow us to define digital libraries rigorously and usefully. Streams are sequences of arbitrary items used to describe both static and dynamic (e.g., video) content. Structures can be viewed as labeled directed graphs, which impose organization. Spaces are sets with operations that obey certain constraints. Scenarios consist of sequences of events or actions that modify states of a computation in order to accomplish a functional requirement. Societies are sets of entities and activities, and the relationships among them. Together these abstractions provide a formal foundation to define, relate, and unify concepts -- among others, of digital objects, metadata, collections, and services -- required to formalize and elucidate ``digital libraries''. A digital library theory based on 5S is defined by proposing a formal ontology that defines the fundamental concepts, relationships, and axiomatic rules that govern the DL domain. The ontology is an axiomatic, formal treatment of DLs, which distinguishes it from other approaches that informally define a number of architectural invariants. The applicability, versatility, and unifying power of the 5S theory are demonstrated through its use in a number of distinct applications including: 1) building and interpreting a DL taxonomy; 2) informal and formal analysis of case studies of digital libraries (NDLTD and OAI); 3)utilization as a formal basis for a DL description language, digital library visualization and generation tools, and a log format specific for DLs; and 4) defining a quality model for DLs. / Ph. D.

In today's ever-changing world of technology and information, a growing number of organizations and universities seek to store digital documents in an online, accessible manner. These digital library (DL) repositories are powerful systems that allow institutions to store their digital documents while permitting interaction and collaboration among users in their organizations. Despite the continual work on DL systems that can produce out-of-the-box online repositories, the installation, configuration, and customization processes of these systems are still far from straightforward Motivated by the arduous process of designing digital library instances; installing software packages like DSpace and Greenstone; and configuring, customizing, and populating such systems, we have developed an XML-based model for specifying the nature of DSpace digital libraries. The ability to map out a digital library to be created in a straightforward, XML-based way allows for the integration of such a specification with other DL tools. To make use of DL specifications for DSpace, we create a DL generator that uses these models of digital library systems to create, configure, customize, and populate DLs as specified. We draw heavily on previous work in understanding the nature of digital libraries from the 5S framework for digital libraries. This divides the concerns of digital libraries into a complex, formal representation of the elements that are basic to any minimal digital library system including Streams, Structures, Spaces, Scenarios, and Societies. We reflect on this previous work and provide a fresh application of the 5S framework to practical DL systems. Given our specification and generation process, we draw conclusions towards a more general model that would be suitable to characterize any DL platform with one specification. We present this DSpace DL specification language and generator as an aid to DL designers and others interested in easing the specification of DSpace digital libraries. We believe that our method will not only enable users to create DLs more easily, but also gain a greater understanding about their desired DL structure, software, and digital libraries in general. / Master of Science