The purpose of this paper is to present an instance of the system developed in the OmniPaper project, regarding the mechanisms of distributed information retrieval. These mechanisms were developed for newspaper articles and they were then instantiated in the context of the scientific publication.
One of the steps of the system's development was the definition of the metadata layer that supports the research and the navigation functionalities as well as the contents' syndication. Several tasks were performed for the definition of the metadata layer, namely: analysis of several metadata standard vocabularies; selection of the metadata elements; definition of an application profile and the RSS template; development of a metadatabase, through the use of a native Resource Description Framework (RDF) database management system to store the RSS descriptions of the scientific publications; implementation of the search and navigation processes developed in the prototype; finally, tests and validation of all developed functionalities.
The RSS technology is well suited for handling the description of scientific contents. RDF records that were used in the OmniPaper RDF prototype were replaced by RSS. The subject and lexical thesauri were kept. This strong metadata layer allows the creation of several services that facilitate the conceptual search of scientific contents.
The system implemented was tested but not evaluated in a real environment with specific users.
This paper presents a system that uses a central metadatabase to support conceptual searching mechanisms. This is a solution for a value‐added service for the scientific community that is fully based in state‐of‐the‐art standard technologies and is fully open for integration with other systems. Moreover this could be implemented by journals to improve the current mechanisms used to access, distribute and disseminate the scientific research developments.
