Organização da informação em subject gateways

The present dissertation is about Subject Gateways a kind of Internet access service created to serve the academic community’s information needs, characterized for selecting web resources accordingly with quality criteria, describing information with structured metadata languages and to give access through keywords and particularly browsing structure’s development. These services are analyzed from the point of view of processes and ways of organizing information. The five initial Gateways (SOSIG, HUMBUL, EEVL, PSIGATE, BIOME) of the RDN (Resource Discovery Network) are specifically analyzed regarding to used metadata languages and ways of organizing information. This analysis aims to know the process of organizing information, and also evaluate their quality in relation to target audience expectation about systems of organizing bibliographic information of this kind. Within a specifically theoretical framework witch defines the characteristics and aims of any bibliographic information system as well there metadata languages, this analyze was developed in two different ways: from the conceptual point of view, through the study of all cataloguing rules of the services, and from the practical point of view, using a significant sample of each services descriptions and their browsing structures. In both cases the services were analyzed and evaluated accordingly with the criteria defined from the proposed theoretical framework These services use a model based in traditional processes of information organization, with several adjustments in the sense of descriptive simplification and adaptation to the described resources, with special concerns about subject access and representation. The metadata quality about subject as well as the global quality of resources description allows that these services meet some of main user’s expectations. The problems are those related with finding all the documents about the same Author, all documents belonging to the same Work, all documents belonging to the same Version, and, at last, to be able to Navigate in the bibliographic universe.