ARION: an Advanced Lightweight Architecture for Accessing Scientific Collections

B. Falcidieno (1), C. Houstis (2), S. Marini (1), M.Spagnuolo (1), E. Vavalis (2)

(1) IMATI-CNR (National Council for Researches), Genova Dept. (IT)
(2) ICS-FORTH, Science and Technology Park of Crete Vassilika Vouton, Heraklion, Crete (GR)

The FP5 IST Project "ARION: An advanced lightweight architecture for accessing scientific collections" , started January 2001, is aiming at providing a new generation of Digital Library services for the searching and retrieval of digital scientific collections that reside within research and consultancy organizations geographically distributed. These collections contain data sets, simulation models and tools in various scientific areas and incorporate applications of different domains of knowledge.

ARION advances the findings of previous studies in this area and consolidates the work of international interoperability standard development to provide a system that is complementary to established scientific practices in these organizations. ARION has been developed as a federated open system and has been developed in association with national data providers, scientific researchers and SMEs to ensure that the project meets their needs.

The key feature of ARION is to enable the dynamic production of scientific information, which is unprecedented in a Digital Library context. Unlike traditional DL objects, scientific objects are complicated candidates for re-use unless precise information is stored within the DL about their use. ARION records expert knowledge for information domain representation and stores them through the definition and specification of ontologies, which can be used for retrieval as well as for dynamic data set production.

The ARION has been tested in the application area of Coastal Zone Management, and may be extended and customized to different environmental applications in which simulation models are used in association with data and tools, such as, climate change, air pollution, fisheries, agricultural applications, mining applications, medical applications, engineering and manufacturing.