On organizing and accessing geospatial and georeferenced Web resources using the G-Portal system

in order to organise and manage geospatial and georeferenced information on the Web making them convenient for searching and browsing, a digital portal known as G-Portal has been designed and implemented. Compared to other digital libraries, G-Portal is unique for several of its features. It maintains metadata resources in XML with flexible resource schemas. Logical groupings of metadata resources as projects and layers are possible to allow the entire metadata collection to be partitioned differently for users with different information needs. These metadata resources can be displayed in both the classification-based and map-based interfaces provided by G-Portal. G-Portal further incorporates both a query module and an annotation module for users to search metadata and to create additional knowledge for sharing respectively. G-Portal also includes a resource classification module that categorizes resources into one or more hierarchical category trees based on user-defined classification schemas. This paper gives an overview of the G-Portal design and implementation. The portal features will be illustrated using a collection of high school geography examination-related resources. (c) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.