Managing digital repositories through an ontology-based design

The conventional design of digital repository systems provides little flexibility and is often difficult to scale and customize. The authors analyzed the causes for inflexibility and difficulties in managing digital repository systems and proposed an ontology-based design in managing digital repository systems in this paper. The ontology focuses on the system controls that manage a wide array of functions such as object data, user access control, and rights management. The authors used an instance in the Object class to demonstrate how the ontology can be used to reduce the difficulties in conventional design of repository systems.