A Semantic Metadata Enrichment Software Ecosystem (SMESE) Based on a Multi-Platform Metadata Model for Digital Libraries

Abstract

Software industry has evolved to multi-product and multi-platform development based on a mix of proprietary and open source components. Such integration has occurred in software ecosystems through a software product line engineering (SPLE) process. However, metadata are underused in the SPLE and interoperability challenge. The proposed method is first, a semantic metadata enrichment software ecosystem (SMESE) to support multi-platform metadata driven applications, and second, based on mapping ontologies SMESE aggregates and enriches metadata to create a semantic master metadata catalogue (SMMC). The proposed SPLE process uses a component-based software development approach for integrating distributed content management enterprise applications, such as digital libraries. To perform interoperability between existing metadata models (such as Dublin Core, UNIMARC, MARC21, RDF/RDA and BIBFRAME), SMESE implements an ontology mapping model. SMESE consists of nine sub-systems: 1) Metadata initiatives & concordance rules; 2) Harvesting of web metadata & data; 3) Harvesting of authority metadata & data; 4) Rule-based semantic metadata external enrichment; 5) Rule-based semantic metadata internal enrichment; 6) Semantic metadata external & internal enrichment synchronization; 7) User interest-based gateway; 8) Semantic master catalogue. To conclude, this paper proposes a decision support process, called SPLE decision support process (SPLE-DSP) which is then used by SMESE to support dynamic reconfiguration. SPLE-DSP consists of a dynamic and optimized metadata-based reconfiguration model. SPLE-DSP takes into account runtime metadata-based variability functionalities, context-awareness and self-adaptation. It also presents the design and implementation of a working prototype of SMESE applied to a semantic digital library.