Abstract. A Service Oriented Approach for Integrating Metadata from Heterogeneous Digital Libraries

Metadata in today’s digital library systems are accessible through various incompatible interfaces and correspond to heterogeneous schemas. Clients that want to search over a number of distributed metadata sources require a solution that provides uniform and location transparent access to these systems without replicating the metadata stored therein. In this paper we describe a metadata integration approach that conceives these data sources as services in the sense of a service oriented architecture. Without forcing clients to adopt a pre-defined mediation schema, we want to give them the possibility to query multiple autonomous and distributed metadata services by formulating SPARQL queries. 1