Collection Management

The collection Management Service allows to manipulate collections of complex documents, whose reference model is defined in Content Management.

Reference Model

Document collections are the basic data structure used to organize information inside the Information Organization Services. They are simple unordered sets of complex documents. Each collection is characterized by a collection identifier, labelled with a number of specific properties, and contains a number of documents. Collections can in turn be nested, i.e. a collection can appear as member of another collection. A collection can be static (or materialized), that is contain a statically defined number of objects, that are added to it or deleted from it explicitly, or be virtual. The content of a virtual collection is not determined statically, but rather specified through declarative membership predicates that define which objects currently present in the gCube information-objects space are part of the collection. Its contents are thus determined dynamically at the moment when the collection is accessed by evaluating the membership predicates. For example, it is possible to define the collection of all objects having a certain MIME type (e.g. pdf).