CYCLADES is part of a collaborative EU-US research proposal aimed at developing an open collaborative e-print archive environment to support virtual scholarly communities. From the architectural viewpoint, this environment will comprise two interacting components: the archives and the services. The former consists of heterogeneous multidisciplinary archives and supports interoperability between them. The latter is composed of a number of independent but interoperable mediator services to support both single scholars and communities of scholars in their work.

The main objective of CYCLADES is to develop advanced Internet accessible services to support scholars both individually and as members of networked communities when interacting with large interdisciplinary electronic (e-print) archives. CYCLADES aims at supporting the transition of e-print systems into genuine building blocks of a transformed scholarly communication model by developing a set of leading edge technologies providing innovative methods for information access, dissemination, sharing and collaborative work. The proposed open archives environment consists of two components: the archives and the services. The former will participate using an interoperability protocol developed by the Open Archives initiative (OAi). This protocol enables archives to expose metadata in various forms and that can be used by a variety of services. CYCLADES will base the development of the service environment on these specifications. In particular, a core set of cross-archive value-added services will be developed to constitute a federation of independent but interoperable services. The Service Environment will provide OAi compliant functionality. The CYCLADES services comprise the following: Access Service supports information gathering, plus indexing and storage of gathered information in a local database. Search and Browse Service develops plans for the execution of user queries. An ad-hoc or a profile-based user query will be decomposed into more simple sub-queries to be sent to the Access Service for execution. The results of the sub-queries are fused and returned to the user. A browse facility is also supported. Collection Service provides mechanisms for dynamically building meaningful collections. Personalization Service supports personalization of information access on the basis of individual user profiles and of profiles of scholarly communities to which users belong. Recommendation Service provides recommendations to satisfy information needs of a user based on ratings provided by other users or groups. Collaborative Work Service supports collaboration between members of virtual communities. Community working areas are created to use the OAi content in collaborative work.

Project Information: Fact sheet [pdf], Publicly available deliverables: User Requirements Report [pdf], Functional Specifications [pdf]