You can think of it as the United Nations of knowledge - except no dictators wearing pistols are allowed to get up and spout nonsense. Or you could think of it as the Wikipedia of knowledge, without letting marketing people and activists control what gets seen.
Europeans call it DRIVER and it already has millions of documents.
The backbone of DRIVER is a technological breakthrough that enables institutions to link repositories of knowledge together into one huge, networked online ‘library of libraries’. The software, called D-NET, can link information collected on diverse computer platforms, using legacy software which can still ‘talk’ or work with older systems.
So far, over 240 institutions from 27 European countries speaking 25 languages have been linked together, creating the DRIVER Search Portal, the door to European Open Access research. It regularly harvests journal articles, books, dissertations, lectures and reports. Today, there are about 1 million documents available to search. This number looks set to grow, as more and more institutions realise how simple and fast it is to register their online repositories as well, suggests Ioannidis.
DRIVER’s work could transform the way we manage or organize data not just across systems but also borders – a United Nations (UN) for keeping knowledge safe is the way they continually describe it, because Europeans don't realize the UN is actually an expensive, bureaucratic boondoggle that has no value .
DRIVER began with an inventory of Europe’s repositories, tracing those who make up Europe’s open access community. A technology watch – to track the latest developments in information science and repository management – was created and has been very active in setting standards in this field.
One important output of DRIVER’s towards this was the Guidelines for Repository Managers, a key document that establishes the rules for creating interoperability between different systems.
The DRIVER search portal, for instance, is something of a working demonstration of this vision, and the Guidelines are the major engine for realising that vision. Then, over time, repositories across the world could develop and adapt their content format to be compatible with the DRIVER platform and guidelines.
It’s a bit of a dream scenario, but DRIVER is taking it seriously, creating an online tool that can validate repositories according to the standards set by the project. A further effort in this direction is the DRIVER confederation, a network of content providers and digital repository/library stakeholders, which, among others, aims to advance DRIVER from a testbed project to a fully functional international organization.
The project’s work has receivedinterest internationally, with repositories from China, India, South America and elsewhere making contact with the DRIVER partners and developing plans for their own deployment. The Chinese Academy of Science is currently evaluating D-NET for its national repository. So far, there have been more than 800 downloads of the D-NET open source code.
In the medium to long term, there is scope for commercialization of the D-NET platform. “D-NET is a powerful system [like a content management system], so there is commercial potential for [it],” says the project’s coordinator, professor Yannis Ioannidis. But the current priorities for DRIVER are to get the system up and running, and get more institutions using the platform.
“Our next task is to extend the system, so that it goes beyond text documents and can handle any type of media. But certainly it is available to commercial enterprises, and anybody else, under the open source licence.”
The DRIVER technology offers potential to private content providers, allowing them to easily link repositories together, or to link their data with other organisations. In all, DRIVER represents a concerted and ongoing effort to bind together the wealth of knowledge and research in Europe, and indeed the world.
The DRIVER project received funding from the Research Infrastructure priority of the EU’s Sixth Framework Programme for research.
Driver project
More on Driver from Cordis Europa
Another aspect of having an online repositories, is the use and development of a space-based internet system that is accessed by individuals that are mining resources on the moon or humans as they travers the Martian landscape. In this aspect, humans could access the databases for information about geological resources and mineral concentrations on the Moon. Even in crater specific areas, the geologist could use the repositories to store online documents that are written and then shared by individuals upon the Earth.
Thinking upon use of this technology on Mars, imagine an astrobiologist that has discovered extremophilic bacteria residing in a cavernous system on the forth planet. In this aspect, their genomic-tri-corder, could assess the gene sequences of the extremophilic bacteria then correlate it with known terrestial bacterial form to verify the potential that life was shared between Earth and Mars at some point in time. Even if a population of 2,000 individuals were to travel to Mars, in the later half of the 21st Century, the population of individuals would need access to various types of information; to actually build equipment or duplicate equipment that existed on the Earth. Utilizing artificial intelligence and robotic technology, probably designed by engineers in Japan, humaniod bipedial robotic systems could actually be utilized to build and construct dome living area for the human population. Therefore, robotic system could access the online information for specific and detail schematic drawings of CAD designed buildings for the Martian Equatorial regions that the population would reside.