Rapid Modeling, Prototyping, and Generation of Digital Libraries- A Theory-Based Approach

Despite some development in the area of DL architectures and systems, there is still little support for the complete life cycle of DL development, including requirements gathering, conceptual modeling, rapid prototyping, and code generation and reuse. Even when partially supported, those activities are uncorrelated within the current systems, which can lead to inconsistencies and incompleteness. Moreover, the current few existing approaches are not supported by comprehensive and formal foundations and theories, which brings problems of interoperability and makes it extremely difficult to adapt and tailor systems to specific societal preferences and needs of the target community. In this paper, having the 5S formal theoretical framework as support, we present an architecture and a family of tools that allow rapid modeling, prototyping, and generation of digital libraries. 5S stands for Streams, Structures, Spaces, Scenarios, and Societies and is our formal theory for DLs. 5SL is a domain-specific, declarative language for DL conceptual modeling. 5SGraph is a visual modeling tool that helps designers to model a digital library without knowing the theoretical foundations and the syntactical details of 5SL. Furthermore, 5SGraph maintains semantic constraints specified by a 5S metamodel and enforces these constraints over the instance model to ensure semantic consistency and correctness. 5SGraph also enables component reuse to reduce the time and efforts of designers. 5SLGen is a DL generation tool that takes specifications in 5SL and a set of component pools and generates portions of a running DL system. The outputs of 5SLGen include user interface prototypes, in a generic UI markup language, for validation of services behavior and workflow representations of the running system, generated to support the desired scenarios.