Improving Requirements Quality in Digital Libraries The case of Scientific Proceedings Neide Ferreira Alves Universidade do Estado do Amazonas Manaus-Amazonas-Brazil nfalves@uea.edu.br Maria Lencastre Universidade de Pernambuco Recife-Pernambuco-Brazil maria@dsc.upe.br Rafael Dueire Lins Universidade Federal de Pernambuco Recife-Pernambuco-Brazil rdl@cin.ufpe.br Abstract— Proceedings of technical events, postgraduate theses, and technical reports in many different areas of knowledge witness the history of the development of that area; The experience gained in the development of digital libraries may be used in the documents domain to help building similar systems achieving higher quality standards, at the same time as reducing the time and costs needed in the creation of a new system. This paper describes and systematizes a methodology to give support for the requirements definition in the Digital Library Domain (specifically the ones built for scientific proceedings), based on the experience of three document processing platforms. The aim is to describe a general structure and requirements to guide system developers on how to build other similar digital libraries, either from printed or from electronic documents. Keywords: Digital libraries, proceedings, document engineering, document processing, quality. I. INTRODUCTION In order to increase the productivity in the development of software products, many efforts have been applied to give support for their creation from previous knowledge, thus facilitating their development and giving support to achieve higher quality standards [16]. The concept of software reuse [19] is fundamental in modern software engineering and consists in employing previously developed software artifacts in the generation of a new system. The reuse of software could be applied in any product that is part of the software life-cycle, not only code fragments. This means that the developers can make reuse of requirements documents, specifications, architectural projects or any other artifact in the process of software development [18]. Software reuse is becoming a pillar in Software Engineering. Many techniques were developed to help software reuse, besides aiming to reduce costs and efforts, it improves software quality and reliability [6]. Among the existing reuse techniques we can identify: Frameworks [6] which are used when there are common functionalities for different applications; a framework is a skeleton of an application that can be personalized for a particular application, being a guide for the project of abstract classes involved in the definition of its responsibilities and collaborations [1]; Software Product Lines (LP) focus on the development considering a family of applications as the basis [17]; Design patterns that propose a standardized documentation for a recurrent solution, that previously has been well tested, support an explicit specification of classes and objects interactions [1], and so on. The aim here is to describe a general structure and requirements to guide how to build digital libraries, either from printed or from electronic documents. The specification of the involved artifacts represents a kind of a framework which includes: general scheme, involved issues, requirements, constraints, features, and persistent data. The details are given in such a way that information and knowledge represented by the defined artifacts, obtained from previous experiences, help building new digital libraries and also to improve their quality. It is important to consider that the proceedings of technical events provide a written testimony of the development of a research area. Generally, in the past, printed copies of proceedings were restricted to attendees; they were difficult to obtain and very often disappear soon after the event; bringing gaps in the history of the evolution of events and even research areas [15]. With the advent of the digital version of proceedings in CD adopted by many conferences from late 1990s the situation became no better, if not worse as proceedings became more “volatile”. Similar problems are found in academy for obtaining references from technical reports, dissertations, PhD thesis, and personal official documents and so on. The experience gained in the development of the SBrT- Digital Library with the proceedings of the technical events of the Brazilian Telecommunications Society (SBrT) from 1983 to 2011, was the seed to the development of the LiveMemory platform [11]. The events called Brazilian Telecommunications Symposium and ITS – International Telecommunitaions Symposium, the quadrennial version of SBrT in partnership with IEEE are the leading events of its gender in Latin America. LiveMemory is a software tool that aims to help building digital libraries of proceeding of events, which encompasses several image processing and PDF processing tools tailor developed and integrated. This paper describes and emphasizes an approach to give support for the requirements definition in the scientific document domain, based on the experience obtained during the development of three document platforms: the LiveMemory [15], Academus [14], and Thanatos [7]. LiveMemory, as already mentioned, generates integrated digital libraries for scientific proceedings originated form technical conferences. The Academus platform creates digital libraries of M.Sc and Ph.D. theses. Thanatos is a 2012 Eighth International Conference on the Quality of Information and Communications Technology Unrecognized Copyright Information DOI 10.1109/QUATIC.2012.82 211 2012 Eighth International Conference on the Quality of Information and Communications Technology 978-0-7695-4777-0/12 $26.00 © 2012 IEEE DOI 10.1109/QUATIC.2012.82 211