Durable Item Relations for DSpace

OVERVIEW

Context

DSpace 4 out of the box

Initial approach

Revised approach

Creating and managing relations

Conclusions

CONTEXT

What is the resemblance between

CONTEXT

CONTEXT

GOOD ANSWERS

Based in Flanders

Subject to annual environment reports

ANNUAL ENVIRONMENT REPORTS

A complex object with different parts and

attachments

Metadata recorded and represented in XML

Mix of confidential and public data

Prime usecase for digital preservation, open data

and archiving at the Flemish government

DSPACE 4 OUT OF THE BOX

One-to-many relationships

Community > Collection > Item > Bundle > Bitstream

Metadata and search: Item as the central object

Not optimized for large numbers of collections

Resource policies

INITIAL APPROACH

Typed items: “Document” Items vs “Dossier” Items

Typed relations ... as a new DSObject

Cardinality and type enforced

INITIAL APPROACH - NEW DSPACE OBJECTS

SERVICE IMPLEMENTATION

SERVICE IMPLEMENTATION

SERVICE IMPLEMENTATION

INITIAL APPROACH - NEW DSPACE OBJECTS

INITIAL APPROACH - EXTENSIBILITY

“How do we add archiving support for

another application with a different kind of

complex object?”

Answer: adding new RelationshipTypes,

Relationships and Typed objects in the

DSpace Java codebase.

“A new release of our DSpace codebase, every time we

want to support a new set of complex objects?”

“Yeah - that’s not going to fly”

REVISED APPROACH

Generic relationship-types: hasPart and isPartOf

No more typed items - allow these relations

between all kinds of items

CREATING RELATIONSHIPS

SWORD Package deposit for an entire archival

package. Results in different related items

Shared codebase with CLI Item ingestion tools

UI for creating and modifying relationships not

in scope yet

EXPOSING RELATIONSHIPS

Item pages list related items, and the nature of

the relation (hasPart and isPartOf)

Relations are indexed in Discovery as well for

exposure via SOLR

Soon: relationships exposed via REST API

CONCLUSION

Enforcing cardinality

DSpace 5 features

Metadata 4 all

Better performance for many collections

Contribution - Looking for feedback!

IMAGE CREDITS

Oriol Salvador https://www.flickr.com/photos/boarderland/

Steve Taylor https://www.flickr.com/photos/esartee/

Tiochorchi http://tiochorchi.deviantart.com/