The Research On Mobile Access And Rights Management Of Digital Library

With the rapid development of digital and network technology since 1990s, digital library is becoming a hot research field in computer science and information retrieval. Digital library makes use of Web to serve the user. Users can access the digital library with computers connected to the Internet. However, computer is too heavy to take with and takes a long booting time, so one can't easily access the digital library with a computer when he/she is traveling or in the conference. To solve this problem, Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) and wireless network technology are proposed. Users can use PDAs to access the Internet through wireless network. Although the digital library shares the same problems with the general websites, it has its own special features. When accessing the digital library with a PDA, new problems will occur which block the application and popularity of the digital library. Therefore, in this thesis we'll look into the digital library's mobile access. Meanwhile, mobile access brings problems to the digital library. It will complicate the rights management of digital library. Because mobile access means you can copy and transfer a digital object anywhere and any time. This will do harm to the author of digital library. Therefore, we'll also deal with the rights management of the digital library. The thesis is organized as follows:In the first chapter, we introduce the background and motivation of this thesis, the state of the art of mobile access and the rights management technology, and the brief description of this work.In the second chapter, a survey of Internet's mobile access and rights management is made.In the third chapter, a novel approach to interact with the digital library using PDAs is proposed. The main idea is to use an agent server. The agent server is used to accept users' requests, forward the valid ones to the digital library server, process the received HTML files from the digital library server and then send them to the users.In the fourth chapter, an approach to solve the rights management problem caused by PDA access is described. The main idea is to encrypt digital contents before sending them to the users. License server generates a license which is bound with the user's hardware configuration. The user makes use of the digital content after getting the license which includes the decryption key.In the fifth chapter, we conclude the work and discuss the future work.