A model for digital libraries and its translation to RDF

With the advent of the Web, the traditional con- cept of library has undergone a profound change: from a collection of physical information resources (mostly books) to a collection of digital resources. In addition, the notion of digital resource includes not only texts in digital form, but also, in general, any kind of multimedia resources. In a tra- ditional library, physical information resources are managed through well-understood manual procedures, whereas in a digital library digital resources are organized according to a data model, discovered through a query language and man- aged in a highly automated way. In this paper, we present a data model and query language for digital libraries support- ing identification, structuring, metadata support, re-use and discovery of digital resources. The model that we propose is inspired by the Web and it is formalized as a first-order theory, certain models of which correspond to the notion of digital library. Additionally, we provide a full translation of the model in RDF and of the query language in SPARQL.