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The database schemas are an integral part of the BEA WebLogic
E-Business Platform and are described in individual chapters specific
to the three main sections of the documentation:
E-Marketing Solutions
Building Commerce Features
Building Personalization Features
The metadata for items in the databases used
in the BEA WebLogic E-Business Platform are based on the Dublin
Core Metadata Open Standard. This standard offers a number
of advantages:
Simplicity - The Dublin Core is intended
to be usable by non-catalogers as well as resource description
specialists. Most of the elements have commonly understood
semantics that is roughly the complexity of a library catalog
card.
Semantic interoperability - In an Internet
environment, disparate description models interfere with the
ability to search across discipline boundaries. Promoting
a commonly understood set of descriptors that helps to unify
other data content standards increases the possibility of
semantic interoperability across disciplines.
International consensus - Recognition
of the international scope of resource discovery on the Web
is critical to the development of effective discovery infrastructure.
The Dublin Core benefits from active participation and promotion
in some 20 countries in North America, Europe, Australia,
and Asia.
Extensibility - The Dublin Core provides
an economical alternative to more elaborate description models
such as the full MARC cataloging of the library world. Additionally,
Dublin Core includes sufficient flexibility and extensibility
to encode the structure and more elaborate semantics inherent
in richer description standards.
Metadata modularity on the Web - The
diversity of metadata needs on the Web requires an infrastructure
that supports the coexistence of complementary, independently
maintained metadata packages. The World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C) has begun implementing an architecture for metadata
for the Web.
The Resource Description Framework, or
RDF, is designed to support the many different metadata needs
of vendors and information providers. Representatives of the
Dublin Core effort are actively involved in the development
of this architecture, bringing the digital library perspective
to bear on this important component of the Web infrastructure.
For more information about the Dublin Core Metadata Open Standard,
please see http://purl.org/dc.
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Database
Schemas
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