Hermes: A Notification Service for Digital Libraries.

The high publication rate of scholarly material makes searching and browsing an inconvenient way to keep oneself up-to-date. Instead of being the active part in information access, researchers want to be notified whenever a new paper in one's research area is published. While more and more publishing houses or portal sites offer notification services, this approach has several disadvantages. This paper introduces the Hermes altering service, a service that integrates a variety of different information providers making their heterogeneity transparent for the users. Hermes offers sophisticated filtering capabilities preventing the user from drowning in a flood of irrelevant information. From the user's point of view, it integrates the provides into a single source. Its simple provider interface makes it easy for publishers to join the service and thus reaching the potential readers directly. This paper presents the architecture of the Hermes service and discusses the issues of heterogeneity of information sources. Furthermore, it discusses the benefits and disadvantages of message-oriented middleware for implementing such a service for digital libraries. (Contains 18 references.) (Author/AEF)