Prometheus - the distributed digital image archive for research and tuition

Hohmann, Georg Prometheus - the distributed digital image archive for research and tuition., 2003 . In 3rd. Open Archives Forum Workshop, Berlin, March 2003. [Presentation]

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English abstract

As part of its "New Media in education"- program the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research is financing the cooperative university project "prometheus - the distributed digital image archive for research and tuition". The three-year project has set to work in April 2001. The partners are the University of Cologne, the Humboldt University of Berlin, the Justus-Liebig-University of Giessen and the University of Applied Sciences of Anhalt at Dessau/ Köthen. The aim of prometheus is to provide a unified interface to a conceptually very large number of different image data bases that focuses history of art and archaeology. The basic philosophy of the project is, that the individual image databases can have arbitrary different formats, which are unified by a server acting as a technical - and potentially conceptual -"broker". Based on this joined image archive und its media specific potential, prometheus will provide a variety of didactic units to support academic teaching and (e-)learning in the disciplines of Art History, Classical Archaeology, and Design History. The prometheus central server uses a data model developed over the years for historical research, which build upon the idea of semantic network data bases. In recent years it turned out, that the data structures which can be administered by the system - kleio - are a superset of the data structures which can be expressed by XML. The stage one solution - the contributing data bases send XML dumps to the central server, which maps their structures and semantics into a common system - is currently being replaced by stage two, where instead of dumps being transferred the contributing data bases are mapped dynamically. If we see the OAI as an attempt to provide integrated access to heterogeneous data sources by a specific protocol discipline required of the contributors, prometheus might be seen as the opposite end, as all the effort in the integration is taken care of by the central server, making no specific requirements of the contributing systems. Providing OAI access to all the contributing databases, simply by supporting the protocol by the server in this way, would be easy. It is not planned for, however, at the moment: Among other reasons, as that would make the handling of existing copyright restrictions all the more difficult.

Item type:	Presentation
Keywords:	Open Archive Initiative (OAI), Art History, Classical Archaeology, Design History, XML
Subjects:	L. Information technology and library technology
Depositing user:	Andrea Marchitelli
Date deposited:	11 Apr 2005
Last modified:	02 Oct 2014 11:58
URI:	http://hdl.handle.net/10760/4709

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