Research: Software

DESIRE Software Toolkit

This is the home page for the DESIRE software toolkit. During the course of the DESIRE project, a number of different software components are being produced. In many cases, these build upon previous work (such as the ROADS toolkit), or on work undertaken in phase one of the project (eg. Combine). Phase two of DESIRE includes a number of workpackages that share common software requirements. The purpose of this toolkit is to provide a supporting environment and framework to allow collective and ongoing development of this software, and to provide both an environment and framework for their maintenance beyond the lifetime of DESIRE-II.

Yet Another Software Toolkit?

There are already a number of 'resource discovery', metadata and Web indexing themed software toolkits in existence. There are also projects such as the Advanced Search Framework (ASF) which draw together a number of smaller components to produce services and applications. ROADS and Combine, for example, are good examples of toolkits which themselves include a number of sub-components, while also usefully serving as components of large applications.

Many of the developments in DESIRE phase two build upon these software distributions. Rather than risk duplication by creating a monolithic 'DESIRE software distribution' for the DESIRE toolkit, we instead adopt a decentralised model. ROADS and Combine have an existence beyond the scope of the DESIRE project. Through the creation of the DESIRE software toolkit, we aim to bring these diverse components together under a broad umbrella.

This page will provide sufficient information for developers to understand the workings of the various components of the toolkit, to participate in the development of the system and build applications that draw upon independently created software tools.

Ingredients...

For now, we simply link to the home pages of some key components of the toolkit. These are software packages that have an ongoing connection with one or more DESIRE project partners, and which are being improved or adapted as part of the DESIRE workplan.

• The Combine harvesting robot
• ROADS Internet cataloguing and search system
• (more to come...)

What next?

Developer support

Expect to see publically-accessible CVS servers here, to allow software developers to track and participate in the creation of these tools. We are currently working to provide CVS views of the ROADS and Combine packages, with more to follow.

New tools!

In addition to working on the packaging, presentation and collaborative development of existing tools, there is a substantial amount of new development work happening in the DESIRE project. Expect to see new packages for RDF metadata storage, manipulation and query, automatic classification tools, RDF representations of thesaurus and classification schemes and more... Many of these tools will be integrated with the software distributions above; others will be packaged as stand-alone components.