New technologies for publishing information on the World Wide Web: a case study at CERN

This thesis studies the problem of information retrieval, discovery and integration of resources applied to a real world case study. An initiative to explain High Energy Physics to the general public (outreach) has been started at CERN. The use of the Web has been identified as crucial to the success of this initiative. This study examines the characteristics of HTML and XML languages and the use of metadata for describing document content in order to improve understanding and discovery. The main part of the work is the study of RDF standard for representing metadata using the XML syntax. The proposed solution is an information system, which collects many different resources on the Web (information published by many European particle physics institutes), organizes and queries them using their metadata description instead of working directly on their contents.