MONTANA: towards a Web-based infrastructure to improve lecture and research in a university environment

We report on current work within our project MONTANA which is a digital media archive for teaching and research. We show how to model structures and describe metadata by the use of XML. We combine the Resource Description Framework, which is an application of XML, with the Dublin Core to provide broad interoperability and data reuse. Our approach models metadata of single objects as well as global coherences. XML in its origin focuses at document markup only. By using XML as a data model several problems appeared. We highlight these problems and motivate the need for an extension.