A Scientific Resource Space Management System

As the web continues to change the way we produce and disseminate scientific knowledge, traditional digital libraries are confronted with the challenge of transcending their boundaries to remain compatible with a world where the whole Web in itself is the source of scientific knowledge. This paper discusses a resource-oriented approach for the management and interaction of scientific services as a way to face this challenge. Our approach consists in building a general-purpose, extensible layer for accessing any resource that has an URI and is accessible on the Web, along with appropriate extensions specific to the scientific domain. We name the class of systems that have this functionality Scientific Resource Space Management Systems, since they are the resource analogous of data space management systems known in literature. In this paper, we describe the motivations, concepts, architecture, and implementation of the platform and one validat- ing usage scenario.