DILIGENT Periodic Activity Report, 2008

The main objective of DILIGENT is to create an advanced testbed knowledge infrastructure that will allow members of dynamic virtual e-Science organisations to access shared knowledge and to collaborate in a secure, coordinated, dynamic and cost-effective way. This testbed infrastructure is being built by integrating Grid and Digital Library technologies. The merging of these two different technologies has the potential to result in an unprecedented level of functionality that can lay the foundations for a next generation e-Science knowledge infrastructures. The DILIGENT testbed infrastructure, which is be based on high bandwidth networks and empowered by WSRF services, aims at serving many different research and industrial applications. In particular, the testbed is going to be demonstrated and validated by two complementary real-life application scenarios: one from the cultural heritage domain and one from the environmental e-Science domain. The first scenario aims to show how the DILIGENT infrastructure, by simplifying the processing of multimedia artefacts and offering support for collaborative multidisciplinary studies, can contribute to favour faster progress in research and better quality of education, also in research areas traditionally far from the most advanced computing technologies; the second scenario intends to show how this knowledge infrastructure, by integrating distributed multi-type data sources with specialised data handling services, can improve accessibility, interoperability and usability of environmental data, models, tools and instruments. Additional important objectives of the DILIGENT project are: · to open up Grid technology to the broader range of research and industrial communities that produce, process and consume knowledge; · to broaden the diffusion of digital libraries by providing a more cost-effective digital library creation and operational model and by supporting new types of documents and tools able to satisfy the communication needs of a larger number of application areas; · to promote cross-fertilisation between the digital libraries and Grid technology domains; this will foster synergies and advances in both of these areas.