Metadata spaces: The concept and a case with REPOX

Abstract

This paper describes REPOX, an XML infrastructure to store, preserve and manage metadata sets. This infrastructure is designed accordingly to the requirements of the OAIS - Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System. It can play the role of a broker or other specific service in a Service Oriented Architecture, aligned with an Enterprise Architecture model, to manage, transparently, data sets of information entities in digital libraries, independently of their schemas or formats. The main default functions of this service are submission, storage, long-term preservation and retrieval. The case is demonstrated with a deployment at the National Library of Portugal, using data collections from two information systems and four schemas: bibliographic and authority metadata from a union catalogue and descriptive and authority metadata from an archive management system. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.