Dilshani Karunarathna
Pera Knowledge Hub
Pera Knowledge Hub is a digital repository developed to preserve, organize, and improve access
to academic publications produced at the University of Peradeniya. The project addresses the
lack of a centralized digital platform for storing research papers, project reports, and theses,
which were previously available primarily as hard copies, limiting their accessibility to
researchers, students, and the wider academic community.
The platform enables University of Peradeniya members to register through a content management
system (CMS) and upload research papers, project reports, and theses in PDF format. Uploaded
documents are securely stored in a centralized repository, providing long-term preservation and
easy access to valuable academic resources.
To improve document retrieval, the system automatically extracts text from uploaded PDF
documents and indexes their contents within the database. This enables users to perform
full-text searches, allowing documents to be discovered not only by their titles or metadata but
also by the content contained within the documents. The search engine returns the most relevant
publications based on the user's search query, significantly improving the efficiency of
information retrieval.
The project involved developing the web-based repository, implementing user authentication and
document management features, integrating automated PDF text extraction and indexing, and
designing a content-based search engine for efficient document retrieval. The platform
demonstrates how information retrieval technologies can be applied to improve knowledge sharing,
digital preservation, and accessibility of academic research within higher education
institutions.
Key Responsibilities
* Developed a web-based platform for managing and publishing academic documents.
* Implemented secure user registration and authentication for university members.
* Enabled PDF document upload, storage, and metadata management.
* Designed a content management system (CMS) for document submission and publication.
* Participated in system design, implementation, testing, and deployment.
Technologies
Spring Boot, MySQL, Apache PDFBox, HTML, CSS, JavaScrip, Bootstrap, Git
Gallery
Team
Dilshani Karunarathna
Nuwan Jaliyagoda
Pasan Tennakoon