Specialised subject gateways have become an essential tool for locating and accessing digital information resources, with the added value of organisation and previous evaluation catering for the needs of the varying communities using these. Within the framework of a research project on the subject, a software tool has been developed that enables subject gateways to be developed and managed.
General guidelines for the work were established which set out the main principles for the technical aspects of the application, on one hand, and on aspects of the treatment and management of information, on the other. All this has been integrated into a prototype model for developing software tools.
The needs analysis established the conditions to be fulfilled by the application. A detailed study of the available options for the treatment of information on metadata proved that the best option was to use the Dublin Core, and that the metadata set should be included, in turn, in RDF tags, or in tags based on XML.
The project has resulted in the development of two versions of an application called Potnia (versions 1 and 2), which fulfil the requirements set out in the main principles, and which have been tested by users in real application environments.
The tagging layout found to be the best, and the one used by the writers, is based on integrating the Dublin Core metadata set within the Topic Maps paradigm, formatted in XTM.