Pittwater Content Management

Overview

Pittwater is a multi-media resource cataloguing and description system that supports web content management, discovery and publishing and is based on an XML metadata and content repository.

Using Pittwater, you can easily create and maintain your content by capturing, cataloguing and describing resources. This is aided by the use of controlled vocabularies, taxonomies and thesauruses.

Pittwater allows you to easily create multiple indexes to support fielded and full-text content search and provides for taxonomy-based content browsing.

Pittwater uses site structure and navigation information (described by XML templates), combined with graphical look-and-feel elements (through the use of CSS, graphical assets and XHTML page templates), and populated with content (using XSLTs) and associated content-related images and multi-media objects to render and publish pages on demand.

Separating Look-and-Feel from Site Structure and Content

Pittwater implements a page publishing approach that completely separates the creation and management of site graphical look-and-feel from the structure of the site and its content.

Changes to site structure, look-and-feel and database content are immediately reflected in the rendered site.

Tying it Together

Using Pittwater's web-based management user interface, you describe the structure of your site as a series of sections or branches in a tree-structure. Pittwater also uses this tree-structured description to drive the menus and navigation in your published web site. For each section of the web site, you need a management template (to capture your content) and a render template (to describe how to publish pages in that section.

Using the Pittwater management user interface, you can select standard predefined management templates or create your own in XML. These management templates describe the information content required for each section of the site and allow Pittwater to create for you forms to capture your content and to associate that content with related multi-media assets.

You can select pre-defined render templates or create your own (as XSLTs) to describe how your content is to be rendered into your web pages. Pittwater invokes these render templates from within standard XHTML page templates and the associated CSS when it is time to publish the site.

Interoperability

Pittwater provides interoperable web services that allow organisations to automatically import, transform and export resource-descriptive metadata.

For example, Pittwater is being used by the Victorian Government in a proof of concept metadata hub that accepts resource descriptive metadata from various departments and transforms it into a common format suitable for publishing on the whole-of-government Intranet.

Product Status

Pittwater Version 2 is currently serving a wide variety of web sites in an Applications Services Provider (ASP) model hosted by Motile Associates Pty Ltd in Melbourne. Examples would be Mediasearch, Moyston Fisheries Ltd, the Canada Australia Institute, Manorhouse Apartments, and Pinnacle Valley Resorts.

A future version of Pittwater is intended to be delivered as a boxed licensed product suitable for use in small-to-medium cultural, government and business applications.

Pittwater is being developed by Motile Research Pty Ltd in collaboration with La Trobe University Melbourne and is also currently being used by James Cook University Queensland to build a catalogue of Indigenous Rock Art culture and related multi-media as part of the ARC-funded Quinkan Matchbox project.