1 General presentation of the Agora System

Agora, a Content Management System to present and to edit digital data in the internet. The system is built completely in Java and therefore it is independent from the server operating system. Import and export of data are carried out by open standard formats as XML and structured PDF.

The basis for a digital Agora collection is the description of the document types resp. the digital objects in XML format, where the needed structure characteristics and the set of metadata attributes are recorded. While using XML the Agora data model proves to be completely open and subjects no restrictions at all, neither in repect to the hierarchy of documents nor to their quantity and complexity. The number of digital collections is set arbitrarily, also the amount of structural elements and metadata. So the openness to userdefined structures ensures the configuration of any documenttype, which is possible.

A special feature of Agora is the so-called „Highlighting-in-Facsimile“. This is a combined presentation of the image and the full text. The query is carried out in the text information of the document, the system delivers the results as an image, and the places in the text that were found are marked in the image.

The basic components of the system are the following:

• the Agora repository stores all informationen about the digital object, as fulltext, structural data and metadata. The Agora repository contains a fulltext index, which based on the 'Lucene' search engine.

• the Agora server - a Java servlet as the active component of the system. The Agora server organises the communication between webclient and webserver.

• the Agora HTML templates define the appearance of the Agora application.

• the Agora API (Application Programming Interface) allows to activate all functions of the system from external applications.