Java-based digital library portal for geography education

Abstract

G-Portal is a Java-based digital library system to manage the metadata of geography-related resources on the Web. In addition to providing a flexible repository subsystem to accommodate metadata of different formats using XML and XML Schemas, G-Portal organizes metadata into projects and layers, and supports an integrated and synchronized classification and map-based interfaces over the stored metadata.

G-Portal also includes a classification subsystem that creates category structures and classifies metadata resources into categories based on user-specified classification schemas. Furthermore, G-Portal users can annotate resources and make their

annotations available to others. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of G-Portal and elaborate how Java is used to implement its features.

G-Portal has been designed to be modular and some of the modules can be used as standalone tools. In this paper, we use UML notations to describe the detailed

design of G-Portal and highlight some of the design decisions.