Structuring Educational Media into a Searchable Digital Database with API Access - A prototype for educational media management

Abstract

Digimar is an educational platform for maritime communication that uses several types of learning material, such as videos, transcripts, presentations, documents, images and chatbot content. Before this project, the material lacked a centralized technical interface, which made it harder to search, organize and reuse content across different frontend applications.

This thesis presents the design and implementation of a searchable digital database with API access for Digimar. The system consists of a Go based HTTP REST API, a PostgreSQL database, a static frontend console and a local Docker Compose setup. The API supports several resource types, including chapters, sections, content items, videos, transcripts, PowerPoint files, documents, images and chatbots. It also includes search across metadata and text fields, role based API keys, health and readiness endpoints, and documentation for the API and data model.

The result is a working prototype that provides one shared backend for managing Digimar learning material. Most of the planned goals were completed, including storage of the planned content types, REST API access, search, access control, Docker based local development, documentation and a frontend tool for manual operation. The planned PDF to markdown conversion automation was not completed and remains future work. Other future improvements include more formal database migrations, improved file storage, search ranking based on user preferences and production concerns such as backups, caching and monitoring.