In recent years, the number of information sources offered on the Web has grown tremedously. Support for accessing these information sources has mostly been concentrated on browsing and search tools. Digital libraries and Web directories constitute important initiatives to improve information access, creating and organizing document collections hierarchically, according to different criteria. Search tools, on the other hand, offer a more comprehensive coverage of resources, using robot-based services to collect and index documents, that can be latter accessed using information retrieval techniques. However, technologies applied to search mechanisms on the Web still offer little support to manage document collections, as the association between these documents cannot be explicitly identified, neither by their formats nor by their types. This paper presents a formal structure for organizing and describing collections and their documents on the Web. It is based on a metadata conceptual model which explores relationships between information resources at different levels of granularity. To validate this model, a prototype has been implemented using both a semi-structured and an object-relational database (DB) approach.
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