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The purpose of this paper is to identify the benefits of an approach in which document management systems (DMSs) are based on a formal and explicit document model, primarily in terms of facilitating domain-specific customization.

Within this paper, a generic document model is proposed. The model consists of two layers. A general purpose layer, which represents common features of the documents, and a domain-specific layer, modeling properties particular to application domain. The general purpose layer is based on ISO 82045, providing high degree of interoperability with other systems developed with respect to this set of standard.

Splitting document model into the layers enables DMSs to be tailored for each particular domain of application, depending on the general purpose layer. The existence of domain-specific layer allows documents to be interpreted differently in different domains of application.

In order to enable customization of DMS for a particular domain, the implementation of domain-specific document layer is required. Also, the proposed model does not explicitly deal with document dynamics.

The proposed document ontology is general enough to provide the representation of documents not depending on a specific scope of application, yet flexible enough to enable extensions through which domain-specific document features can be expressed. The separation of document model enables development of core DMS offering services relying explicitly on the general purpose layer on one hand, as well as domain-specific customization of DMS on the other.

The purpose of this research is to enable dynamic customization of metadata that describes educational resources in digital repositories.

Users need to describe educational resources in digital repositories according to a user-specific metadata set. As users generally do not have the skills to customize the software application manually, this approach relies on the techniques of model-driven software engineering, which should allow customization of the software application programmatically with no need to develop or order a new software application. An experiment was conducted to evaluate the proposed solution.

A software platform for managing educational resources described by dynamically extendable metadata is proposed. The platform enables the creation of data models that are programmatically transformed to a Web application for the management of educational resources. In this way, users can create their own models of metadata that are relevant in a particular domain.

The solution has been verified by users with technical knowledge. The appropriateness of the model should still be explored for domain experts with little technical knowledge who desire to define new metadata in their domain.

The solution can be used for digital repositories that store diverse educational resources. Each resource could be described using metadata that relates to the domain the resource belongs to.

Digital repositories standardly describe educational resources using some general metadata, which are more focused on the physical characteristics of resources rather than their semantics. The proposed solution introduces custom domain-specific semantics into the description of the resources, which improves their retrieval.