Content Management Services
Overview
Digital Libraries (DLs) are considered to be the main platforms for managing and sharing data and knowledge within communities. Therefore, DLs have to deal with a rich variety of data ranging from traditional documents to complex multimedia objects which combine text and audio-visual content, or even sensor data streams. The Content Management services in DILIGENT provides operations for persistently storing, physically structuring, and efficiently fetching any kind of content, which are represented as generic information objects on the Grid.
The Content Management in DILIGENT, in particular, distinguishes certain 'flavors' of content. It allows content to be interrelated in multiple ways and be attributed by arbitrary properties. It further allows external data sources to be coupled to DILIGENT and provides appropriate means of observing content for changes and propagating those events to interested parties.
Content Management provides the digital library operations to deal with content creation, updates and removal, establishing and maintaining relationships. It distinguishes between documents and collections. Collections are a logical way of grouping documents, where one document can belong to more than one collection. Documents themselves might be structured: A document can contain several parts, where each part is a document itself (e.g. a text part and two images) and each document may also have alternative representations (e.g. one image may be available in several formats and or resolutions).
Features
- Allows for logical grouping of documents in collections – independent of physical locations.
- Documents can be shared among several collections.
- Documents can have complex structures like consisting of several parts and having multiple representations.
- Exploits functionality of Storage Management and Replication Management, e.g. propagation.
- Provides with Notification Service an interface for other services to register for change notification of individual documents or collections.
- Archive Import provides a 'one-stop shopping' for populating the digital library with pre-existing content by importing documents into a new collection while also importing associated metadata to metadata catalog (MC) at the same time.