Home >
Activities >
Committees >
ASGF >
Standards > Requirements
Requirements for Subject Gateway Software
The information below is not intended as an exhaustive or prescriptive
list but rather a useful checklist of common and/or desirable features. The
list is based on the experience of a number of the Australian subject gateways,
particularly AVEL and Agrigate.
Suggestions for additions or updates are welcome - please contact the
Library's Coordination Support Branch at: csb@nla.gov.au.
Features
- The repository shall store metadata records and make them available
for editing and searching.
- It shall support the
Dublin
Core model of metadata, with qualifiers.
- It shall be possible to extend the repository to include custom
elements and custom qualifiers.
- It shall be possible to specify constraints on the metadata
records, which shall include mandatory.
- The repository should support multiple schemas in the same
repository.
- Records shall have two possible states: active and inactive. Active
records are visible and available to end users. Inactive records are not
visible to end users.
- Authentication shall be required before users are allowed to add
records to or modify the repository.
- Full support for
A-Core metadata shall
be possible.
Maintenance
- The repository shall be able to perform link checking on URL
values, to check that the URL resource is available.
- The results of the link checking file should be generated as HTML
report documents.
- The administrator shall be able to grant access to the repository
and manage users.
- The repository shall indicate records that have not been modified
after a given period of time. This feature is used to review records.
- It shall be possible to identify which user was responsible for
creating and modifying individual records.
- The repository shall identify duplicate records.
Importing and exporting
- It shall be possible to import metadata records from a text
file.
- Imported records shall be merged with the existing records in the
repository.
- It shall be possible to export the entire contents of the
repository to a text file.
- It may be possible to selectively export a subset of records from
the repository.
- The import and export file format should be in XML and be well
documented.
- The format of the export shall be the same as that used by the
import function.
Statistics
- The repository shall report statistics on the records it is
holding.

General
- A manual entry tool shall be provided for manually creating and
editing metadata records.
- Entry tool shall run on standard desktop computer environments.
Minimally, the Win95 platform shall be supported.
- Entry tool shall be easily deployed and should not be encumbered
with licensing and per-seat royalty issues.
- The tool shall support selection of values from a thesaurus for
some elements (such as subject keywords).
Communications with repository
- Entry tool shall be able to connect to the repository across the
Internet.
- The entry tool shall perform authentication before the user is
allowed to retrieve records, create or change records.
- Authentication shall be managed centrally by the repository
administrators.
Schema
- Entry tool shall be configurable to match the schema used by the
repository.
- Entry tool shall validate that records conform to the schema, and
warn.
- Authentication shall be performed on record editors and creators,
and their identity shall be recorded in a log file.
Assistance
- The entry tool should be configurable, before deployment, with
default values for selected elements when a new metadata record is
created.
- The entry tool should be configurable, by the end user, with
default values for selected elements when a new metadata record is
created.
- The entry tool should assist the user by extracting embedded
metadata from HTML resources.
- The entry tool should assist the user by automatically extracting
information from HTML resources.
- The manual entry tool should provide content sensitive help for
record creators.

- No Web crawler requirements are specified, because at this stage
the needs are not known.

Search features
- A Web search interface shall be provided, which allows any users
with a standard Web browser to access the service.
- A simple, keyword based search interface shall be provided.
- An advanced, field based search interface shall be provided.
- The search mechanism shall support phrases.
- The search mechanism shall support stemming of words.
- The search mechanism shall support truncation of words.
- The search mechanism should support case sensitive and case
insensitive searches.
- The search mechanism should support date comparisons on date
values.
- The search interface shall support compound queries (AND, OR, and
NOT).
- A preprocessing mapping mechanism should be provided to allow
automatic transformation of terms and queries. One use of this mechanism is to
translate alternative spellings of words into the spelling used in the
repository.
- The search mechanism should provide context sensitive help for
users.
Display
- URLs shall be displayed as active links on the Web pages.
- The elements displayed by the search results shall be
configurable.
- The look and design of the search entry and results display shall
be configurable.
Statistics
- The system shall be able to report statistics on the number of
searches processed.

- A Web based browsing interface shall be provided to allow users to
browse through records in the repository.
- The browse facility should allow limiting by resource type.
- Browse headings shall be automatically generated from the subject
field in the record template.
- A customised interface shall be supported.

- A "What's New" listings file including the ability to restrict the
list generated to the last "x" resources added and resources added since a
particular date shall be generated.
- The "What's New" listings file shall be converted into a static
HTML document for WWW display.
- The entries that are listed in the "What's New" listing file shall
be removed if added before a defined date or "x" resources added.

Document History
Barbara Rozmus,
NLA
Initial Draft: November 2000, based on a document
provided by Jan Whitaker
Date last verified: 14 January
2004