The Illinois Digital Library Initiative Project: Federating Repositories and Semantic Research

Abstract

The Illinois DLI Project, one of six projects funded by the NSF/DARPA/NASA DLI, consists of two major components: (1) a production testbed based in a real library (SGML publisher stream deployed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, UIUC) and (2) fundamental technology research for semantic interoperability (semantic indexes across subjects and media developed at the University of Arizona). The Illinois DLI production testbed was developed in the Grainger Engineering library at UIUC. It supports full SGML federated structure search on an experimental Web-based interface. The initial rollout was available at the UIUC campus in October 1997 and has been integrated with the library information services. The testbed consist of materials from 5 publishers, 55 engineering journals, and 40,000 full-text articles. The testbed was implemented using SoftQuad (SGML rendering) and OpenText (full-text search), both commercial software.