Integrating Bibliographical Data from Heterogeneous Digital Libraries

The integration of bibliographical data today is considered one of the most important tasks in the area of digital libraries. Various available sources of bibliographical information vary widely in terms of data representation and access interfaces. To overcome this heterogeneity during the last years attempts were made to apply methods developed for information system integration, like federated databases and mediators. In this paper we describe our approach using the loosely coupled federated system FRAQL. Furthermore, we present a generic adapter that can be used in highly distributed scenarios which uses XML and related technology for transfer and homogenization of data. As an application scenario we describe global citation linking for integrated digital libraries.