Management of nested collections of resources in spatial data infrastructures

The management of collections of resources is an important issue in digital libraries. The modelling of collections provides added-value because they facilitate the organization of resources and special services may be tailored to the characteristics of the collection. We provide a metadata solution to manage nested collections in digital library catalogs, which is based on XML technologies and concepts derived from knowledge bases. The management of collections is particularly relevant in the context of geolibraries and spatial data infrastructures. Given the high volumes of geographic information, it is very frequent to find collections that arise as a result of the fragmentation of geographic resources into datasets of manageable size and similar scale. However, the concepts presented here are extensible to any type of digital library collections.