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Extensible metadata repository for information systems
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| 5.25 MB | Adobe PDF |
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Resumo(s)
Information Systems are, usually, systems that have a strong integration component
and some of those systems rely on integration solutions that are based on metadata (data that describes data). In that situation, there’s a need to deal with metadata as if it were “normal”information. For that matter, the existence of a metadata repository that deals with the integrity, storage, validity and eases the processes of information integration in the information
system is a wise choice.
There are several metadata repositories available in the market, but none of them is
prepared to deal with the needs of information systems or is generic enough to deal with the multitude of situations/domains of information and with the necessary integration features. In
the SESS project (an European Space Agency project), a generic metadata repository was
developed, based on XML technologies. This repository provided the tools for information
integration, validity, storage, share, import, as well as system and data integration, but it required the use of fix syntactic rules that were stored in the content of the XML files. This situation causes severe problems when trying to import documents from external data sources
(sources unaware of these syntactic rules).
In this thesis a metadata repository that provided the same mechanisms of storage,
integrity, validity, etc, but is specially focused on easy integration of metadata from any type of external source (in XML format) and provides an environment that simplifies the reuse of already existing types of metadata to build new types of metadata, all this without having to modify the documents it stores was developed. The repository stores XML documents (known as Instances), which are instances of a Concept, that Concept defines a XML structure that
validates its Instances. To deal with reuse, a special unit named Fragment, which allows
defining a XML structure (which can be created by composing other Fragments) that can be reused by Concepts when defining their own structure. Elements of the repository (Instances,Concepts and Fragment) have an identifier based on (and compatible with) URIs, named Metadata Repository Identifier (MRI). Those identifiers, as well as management information(including relations) are managed by the repository, without the need to use fix syntactic rules,
easing integration.
A set of tests using documents from the SESS project and from software-house ITDS was
used to successfully validate the repository against the thesis objectives of easy integration and promotion of reuse.
Descrição
Thesis submitted to Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in Computer Science