MILOS: un sistema di content management per lo sviluppo di biblioteche digitali

Digital Libraries (DL) are becoming widely used for the archival and management of many different types of digital objects. Depending on the application environment, they provide different functionality such as the management of different media (like images and audio/video), the use of specific metadata models, the support of retrieval based on object's structure or content, etc. In this paper we address the problem of an efficient development of a Digital Library. Our claim is that the development of ad-hoc software modules for each new DL is not effective, while it is advantageous to develop and use a general purpose Content Management System (CMS). We propose the use of the MILOS Multimedia Content Management System which supports the storage and content based retrieval of any multimedia documents whose descriptions are provided by using arbitrary metadata models represented in XML. The paper also illustrates the experiments performed by using the MILOS system to build DLs belonging to four different and heterogeneous collections which contain news, scientific papers, and audio/video documentaries.