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Richard Furuta
Hypermedia Research Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas 77843-3112, furuta@cs.tamu.edu
Understanding structure is a critical step in the process of developing the design of a digital library. Understanding the structures required for a particular digital library requires an understanding of the scope of objects to be stored in the library, of the classes of clients to be served, and of the needs of each of the client groups. The preexisting work in the area of structured documents with its emphasis on logical structuring illustrates a successful case of separating the concerns of the different client classes in the structural design. The specific tree-based, context-free grammar-constrained structures that predominate in the structured document world are not likely to be sufficiently general to handle the wide range of objects in the digital library--collections that include not only text but also graphics, audio, video, computations, and process. Powerful metaphors will have to be developed for these other objects and interrelationships defined. The definition process can be focused by consideration of key structural characteristics.
Keywords: Structure, documents, process, specification, constraint, consistency, reusability.
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