All About EULER
	EULER-TAKEUP Project: Needs and Benefits

EULER-TAKEUP Project
Supported by the IST Programme of the European Community
Project Number IST-2000-29445

Needs and Benefits

"The project has undertaken very significant research into aspects of information management and retrieval within the Dublin Core and Z39.50 environments. The project has revealed important findings in relation to the applicability of these standards. The project has also made valuable explorations into the O(pen) A(rchive) initiative and other relevant and topical areas.

The project appears to make a significant contribution to the area, with potential for portability to other disciplines, as well as further potential for development of the existing service model.

The overall approach is professional and takes into account all relevant issues, including ongoing discussions on metadata, profiling etc. Partners contribute constructively to the metadata standardisation process. Library and end-user needs are reflected to a very high degree. The exploitation potential is great, also with a view to extending the approach to other domains. The project and its approach have the potential of becoming a model for other fields. A richer user interface could make this model even more attractive.

Recommendations:
1.) It is imperative that a solution be found to the technical difficulties encountered with response times.
2.) Future income generation should be based on securing the participation of commercial content providers. The service should remain free at the point of use."

These remarks clearly describe the state-of-the-art position of EULER services, which are unique in the field, and also give a clear picture of innovative aspects that will require further work:

• A funding scheme (concerned also with commercial considerations) will be found, to enable a sustainable future EULER service.
• The economic viability will be shown in this follow-up project to EULER. It will help that for this purpose important publishers in the field of mathematics and other commercial partners such as software producers are now interested in supporting or associating with a consortium of such a project. Various new partners have already expressed their interest in becoming associate partners of the EULER services. Exploitation might furthermore aim at adopting typical commercial strategies based on Web economy.
• Direct "linking" of the EULER gateway to other Z39.50 servers (non-EULER-specific) without the need of conversion of data will be considered.
• Scalability and performance issues will be resolved against the trade-off between decentralized and centralized architectures. Organizational aspects in this context will also be taken into consideration.
• Issues of access control versus free access will be dealt with in future plans.
• The Human-Computer Interface design (search functionality) will benefit from innovative approaches.
• A sustainable service needs to co-exist with all kinds of other initiatives in the information landscape. Therefore, interfacing with these other services seems important. Application to other sciences (also cross searches), e.g. mathematics - physics - computer science opens up additional exploitation potential. Ways will be found to interact with these other services (also outside the EU) in a beneficial way for the end-user.

EULER-TAKEUP is based upon the main, state-of-the-art achievements of the EULER project:

• Open, high quality portal
• This was the main objective of the EULER project. The concept of a one-stop-shop site (portal to heterogeneous resources) has been proven technically feasible, with enabling key features such as cross collection browsing and searching, consolidated hitlist through de-duplication, etc.
• The combination of mathematical bibliographic resources offered is unique. All types of resources have been integrated with a reasonable amount of data from important providers.
• For the first time a homogeneous access to heterogeneous resources was implemented (e.g. access to the preprint, the published article, and the review of the article being available through one single access point).
• Record extraction strategies have been implemented by data providers, leading to a high precision of results.
• Incorporation of "alien" data from non consortium partners is possible (tested with MPRESS, arXiv.org e-Print archive [LANL]).
• European dimension, exploitation and impact of results
• The project was one of the earliest actions in this area. No comparable services/systems are available.
• A cooperation basis among important content suppliers across Europe has been established. New workflow models between partners were explored and implemented. This will lead to a fruitful cooperation in extending the EULER service to a (commercially) exploitable sustainable service.
• Comparisons with and evaluations of related projects/other activities and their results have been done.
• Related projects and other ongoing developments (e.g. DESIRE, DECOMATE, RENARDUS) might benefit from the solutions developed in EULER.
• An exploitation plan has already been developed, taking into account also commercial considerations, aiming at establishing a sustainable and extended EULER service.
• There's a high recognition of the brand name "EULER" in the mathematical community, also outside of Europe.
• User needs and satisfaction:
• Extensive user needs evaluations and result validation activities have been done.
• Standardization and technological achievements
• Interoperability (e.g. cross searching) and standardization issues have been solved: The common EULER metadata profile is an optimal solution, requiring minimal efforts. It is compatible with international standards.
• Other standards (Z39.50, Dublin Core, http) have been proved valuable.
• Difficult technical problems such as sorting and de-duplication of distributed result sets have been solved.
• Several tools - available for use - were implemented, which enable new data providers to join EULER with low technical efforts.
• The EULER de-duplication identifier (as a byproduct) enables new exploitable technologies for filling gaps in data providers information resources.