Google Summer of Code 2008 Semantic Web

From DSpace Wiki

Title: Moving DSpace into the age of the Semantic Web

Student: Peter Coetzee

Mentor: Mark Robert Diggory

[edit] Abstract

The current architecture of DSpace uses the DSpace Intermediate Metadata (DIM) format to store information about the items in its archive. It is presently crafted with a view to being concealed from outer view. This proposal is targeted at translating this private metadata format into an accepted metadata publishing standard, and integrating it into the web of data in accordance with Linked Data best practices (http://linkeddata.org/). By creating de-referencable URIs (as RDF/XML, N3, HTML etc.) for everything in the metadata store, it becomes trivial for a user to browse the data store based around related concepts (“This Author”, “This Subject” and the like) simply by clicking on the metadata item in the Manakin display.

Furthermore, a semantic web client may use these de-referencable URIs as the starting point for information discovery, as well as formulating arbitrarily complex queries over its SPARQL endpoint. This work could directly feed into stated future plans DSpace has outlined for a federated query system over disparate data sources (LDAP, JDBC, DNS, XCat/OCLC/Barton, Google Scholar etc.)

This work would firmly begin to move DSpace into the age of the Semantic Web, providing compelling utility for users, and helping to boot-strap the web of data through the wealth of existing DSpace instances.

[edit] Broad Goals

There are four primary and heavily inter-related components to this proposal:

• Conversion of DIM to a publishable, linked RDF metadata format,
• Embedding of this RDF metadata as RDFa and/or Microformats in Manakin,
• Enabling clickable metadata display in Manakin to de-reference the linked data representations of this metadata, and
• A semantic-web queryable SPARQL endpoint of this metadata, to enable rich and expressive queries to be made across a DSpace repository.