Metadata in a Digital Library of Periodicals

2 Resumen Este trabajo se dedica al análisis y diseño de una biblioteca digital de publicaciones periódicas y revistas científicas. Este tipo de bibliotecas se adscriben a un conjunto de aplicaciones sobre documentos históricos estructurados, el cual fue identificado en otros trabajos previos de los autores [Ara96][Ara97]. Estos problemas han sido abordados desde el punto de vista de las Abstract This paper is devoted to the analysis and design of a digital library of periodicals and academic journals. This kind of libraries pertains to a set of applications about historical structured documents, which has been identified in our previous work [Ara96][Ara97]. We have addressed these applications from the point of view of temporal object-oriented databases, so that the whole multimedia contents of the academic journals are stored into a document database preserving the same logical organisation as given by publishers. In this context, the database query language is in charge of extracting the global or partial contents of stored journals by describing the wished features such as authors, keywords, dates as well as, their temporal relationships. In our model, metadata plays an outstanding role. Firstly, the concept of metadata provides a well-suited framework to model and classify the composition relationships between documents and their temporal properties. By the other hand, the use of metadata improves the expressive power of both document definition and query languages.