An Architecture for Type-based Repository Systems

In the last decade, Institutional Repositories played an important role in knowledge dissemination and sharing. However, the requirements of today’s User Communities have evolved a lot since their original conception. Repositories are expected to provide access to knowledge that escapes the boundaries of their native Institution assets and whose representation goes beyond that of simple digital counterparts of paper documents. Such a novel scenario poses new challenging requirements for Repository systems. This work presents a reference architecture of a Repository system capable of accommodating such needs by (i) empowering the support for managing compound digital objects, (ii) providing mechanisms to create digital objects by aggregating already existing objects made available by third party data sources, and (iii) enabling explicit sharing of knowledge across various repositories.