ESciDoc Logical Data Model/Content Model

A Content Model is a formal representation of the structure of the set of content resources and services applied to the set of content resources.

Example a content model named "CModel: Publication" defines a resource which is an Item, has bibliographic metadata record in accordance with the ESciDoc Publication metadata profile, and may have several PDF file associated that represent the publisher version, the pre-print or some supplementary material. It is used to represent content resources which are published Articles, Conference Papers, Books etc. Example a content model named "CModel:DigitizedBook" is a Container of digitized book pages (items of CModel:DigitizedPage) and related transcriptions (items of CModel:Transcription). The content model of the book container (see image below) defines that is has bibliographic metadata based on the MODS and MAB metadata schema. A digitized book container aggregates page items. Each page item consists of the digitized image of the book page and a metadata record. The metadata record may contain metadata inherited from the book container metadata. In addition, it may has its own, page item specific metadata such as: page number (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4 or I, II, III, IV), chapter information.

Besides providing semantic information about the content and the structure of a resource, a content model may additionally define services that are applicable for the resources that are instances of the content model. Such services are for example specialized image viewers, TEI-formatted text viewers, services that offer various transformations etc.