XTM-based Metadata Exploration and Retrieval: The History of Spanish Civil Engineering Project

This paper describes the History of Spanish Civil Engineering Project. The purpose of this project is to create a web repository where users can access the description of archival materials related to Spanish civil engineers. Personal fonds are being added to this repository based on the initial work completed on the Carlos Fernández Casado and E. Torroja pesonal fonds. From a technical perspective, the project makes use of the RDF and XTM standards to automatically generate topic maps that can be used to browse the different fonds and collections.The system architecture keeps the navigational aids (based on XTM) independent of the descriptive metadata used as a source. The XTM topic map works as an intermediate layer to ensure uniform access to information resources spread across different servers. The paper discusses the differences between RDF and XTM, and how these standards are being applied in the generation of the access layer.