Reducing complexity and cost of Digital Libraries development through Software Product Line Engineering

Resumen

Many research organisations depend on Digital Libraries, Catalogues, or Archives tosupport their activities, especially in Digital Humanities. These organisations confrontthe challenge of obtaining adequate financing to develop the necessary software. Thefunding devoted to software development in the grants available to these research groupsis truly insufficient to confront the entire job at once, so they must use several fundingrounds to complete the necessary budget, further delaying the development of the library.However, when viewed through the lens of Software Engineering, Digital Libraries havecharacteristics that place them in the development paradigm whose goal is to automatethe creation of code from analysis specifications: Software Product Lines (SPL). Therefore,with the goal of minimising the complexity and expense of developing Digital Libraries, wepropose a SPL that allows their software to be generated automatically from the definitionof its data model and features, considerably reducing the budget and time necessary for itsproduction. As a result, Digital Humanities organizations may concentrate on their studyrather than worrying about software development. During the development of the project,we have followed a methodology created by the authors of this paper and successfullytested also in other domains.