This research investigates and proposes a metadata solution for distributed education and collaboration systems, such as Garnet Collaboration System (GCS) [37, 39, 40] and Community Grids [42]. Based on common features of metadata solutions, we demand that our proposal satisfy the following steps:
- A system-wide unique naming scheme for even the smallest amount of metadata that needs to be accessed and processed such as the creation date of a file or the age of an author of a document.
- A scheme or schemes that model metadata. Each object in each module of a system must be identified and modeled; however, schemes must be extendible so that they are compatible with any other metadata standards or user-defined free form of parameterization or configuration, i.e. key and value pairs and schemeless models.
- A repository or distributed repositories to store metadata and make it seamlessly available to distributed applications.
- Interfaces to generate metadata and managed through (1) GUI applications or Web servers for users to browse and modify, and (2) application programming interfaces for software developers to access and update repository content.
- A metadata security management.
Report OutlineIn this paper, we first describe
metadata (Section 2.1.1),
XML as a metadata definition language (Section 2.2), and
metadata repository system architectures (Section 2.3) in Chapter 2. In Chapter 3, we propose a metadata model, a metadata naming scheme, an authoring and management system, and finally, an event model for a collaboration system like Garnet Collaboration System (GCS).
