The Integration of Resource Description Framework (RDF)Object Linking into

Islandora XML-Form Functionality

Exemplified by The FBA Vocabulary and Object Linker Modules in Islandora

Nick Bywell: Freshwater Biological Association

9th May 2014

The FBA Vocabulary Module

The “FBA Vocabulary Module” was written by Simon Fox of the FBA as part of the same project and also benefitted from the oversight of Dr Michael Haft. Specialist expertise in the use of metadata-schema was provided by Richard Gartner and Dr Mark Hedges of KCL. Resource Description Framework (RDF) expertise was provided by Dr Anna Jordanous of KCL. The analysis of the data requirements was performed by Ian Pettman and Hardy Schwamm of the FBA.

The FBA Object Linker Module

The “FBA Object Linker Module” was written by Nicholas Bywell of the Freshwater Biological Association (FBA) as part of a joint project carried out by the FBA and King’s College London (KCL) to archive the scientific data produced by both the Demonstration Test Catchment (DTC) Project and the Greenhouse Gas Project (GHGP), projects that are funded by the UK’s Department of the Environment, Fisheries and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). The development of the module benefited from the oversight of Dr Michael Haft of the FBA and draws on some of the ideas and ontology processing developed by Giancarlo Birello of CNR-Ceris and Rosemary Le Faive of McGill University in the “Islandora Relationship Editor” module.

Dependencies: Islandora-6-13.1 Tuque-1.x Arc2 PHP 5.3.3

Download

https://github.com/FBA/islandora_autocomplete/blob/6.x/modules/sparql/README

https://github.com/FBA/fba_solution_pack_vocabulary/README.md

What does it look like from the perspective of someone with Editor privileges?

Object Linker

One submit => Multiple records ingested

What happens if one of the records is subsequently edited?

One edit => Multiple edits of symmetrically

linked datastreams and RDF links +

Multiple futher ingestions

What happens if you autocomplete on a collection that, unlike a vocabulary, can contain duplicate titles, such as a collection of images?

The appended IDs distinguish duplicates and are automatically removed on ingestion.

A future enhancement could be a cursor-hover function that retrieves specified fields from the duplicate records to allow them to be more easily distinguished.

What happens when records are purged?

Symmetric Datastream entries + RDF statements are unwound on single and collection purges, but not when individual datastreams are purged or when purging is done via the Fedora-Admin Utility.

How is a PDF record linked to a vocabulary or geographic term?

The standard PDF XML Form has “Topic” and “Geographic” fields that are Tag-type fields so it is not possible to set up the sort of autocomplete that required for object linking.

Therefore they must be converted to Tab-panel-type fields. So there are implications for existing data because the XML produced by the two types are not compatible with each other.

How is the object linking configured in the Administrator functionality?

As with the other types of autocomplete, in order to take effect, the name of the autocomplete entry must be quoted in the Advanced Options “Autocomplete” field associated with a specific field on an XML-Form.

It can require the completion of 22 fields to configure the object-linking behaviour of one field on an XML form.

How is the link from a PDF subject term to a vocabulary term configured?

The autocomplete that controls the linking

of a broader subject term to a narrower

subject term in the vocabulary requires all the fields to be completed because there is a symmetrical relationship between the fields in the “subject” and “object” datastreams.

To cater for the scenario where a PDF has been linked to a vocabulary term, and the vocabulary term has been subsequently purged, there would ideally be an option of attaching a “free floating” autocomplete to the vocabulary form. There is currently no such facility, so the autocomplete has been attached to a hidden “Creation Date” field, which is a rather ugly solution.

If the autocomplete linking configuration is changed after records have been added, the RDF-links and datastream-entries associated with any autocomplete entries that have been removed will not be unwound on subsequent edits and purges.

The functionality has implications for collection design and the “Content Model” to “XML-Form” relationship. These issues and further detail on how to configure the object-linking will be covered in an explanatory video.

The Vocabulary Module is just one possible application of the Object Linker processing. It also lends itself to other areas such as taxon processing, plus the purpose it was originally designed for, the publishing of scientific research data as open linked data for the DEFRA DTC & GHG Archiving Project.

In relation to the same DEFRA Project, Dr Anna Jordanous of King’s College London will shortly be describing her work on ingesting and validating CSV files and generating the relevant RELS-INT datastreams.

END