Signposting

Overview

The concept of Signposting is aimed at facilitating machine agents in navigating scholarly information systems easily. Signposting uses typed links to clarify patterns found in scholar portals, offering a standard approach to address the issue of making the descriptive metadata and links in landing pages, usually optimized for human use, readable for machine agents. 

To provide machine-friendly authorship information, the publisher can include author links in the Link header of the HTTP response. Additionally, the publisher can use a "cite-as" link to fetch the persistent identifier of the resource. These links enable bots to follow them and discover relevant additional information related to the resource. 

By adopting Signposting techniques, the users contribute to improving the machine accessibility and navigation of scholarly web resources, enhancing the overall efficiency and interoperability of scholarly information systems. 

More information can be found on the Signposting website: https://signposting.org/  

DSpace supports FAIR Signposting Profile at Level 2: By supporting the FAIR Signposting Profile at Level 2, your platform demonstrates a commitment to improving the machine accessibility, interoperability, and reusability of scholarly resources. It ensures that the information you provide is standardized, consistent, and easily navigable by both human users and machine agents, contributing to a more efficient and FAIR scholarly web ecosystem. More information on: https://github.com/DSpace/RestContract/blob/main/signposting.md  

The FAIR Signposting profile (more information on: https://signposting.org/FAIR/) is based on the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable - https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/). 

• Findability: Your system ensures that scholarly resources are easily discoverable by both humans and machines. It includes the use of persistent identifiers, such as DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers), to uniquely identify and locate resources. These identifiers are included in the signposting links provided in the HTTP responses.
• Accessibility: Your system supports accessibility by providing machine-readable metadata and links that facilitate automated processing. The Signposting Patterns specified in the profile guide the inclusion of links in the HTTP Link headers, HTML link elements, or Link Sets. These links convey essential information about the resource, such as authorship, identifiers, and relationships to other resources.
• Interoperability: Your system promotes interoperability by adopting standardized formats and protocols. It ensures that the signposting links and metadata adhere to established conventions and vocabularies, making it easier for machines to interpret and process the information consistently. By implementing the FAIR Signposting Profile, your system aligns with a community-accepted standard for interoperability.
• Reusability: Your system supports reusability by providing clear and structured metadata about scholarly resources. This includes information about licenses, permissions, and terms of use. By including this information in the signposting links or associated metadata, your system enables users and machines to understand the conditions under which the resources can be reused. 

Enabling / Disabling

Signposting is enabled by default in DSpace 7 (starting with version 7.6).  When enabled on the backend, the ${dspace.server.url}/signposting/ REST Endpoint will be available and can be used based on the documentation at https://github.com/DSpace/RestContract/blob/main/signposting.md.  When disabled, this endpoint will return a 404.

However, if you wish to disable it, you can change this configuration in your local.cfg

signposting.enabled = false

Modifications to this setting require rebooting your servlet container (e.g. Tomcat)

Configuration

Additional signposting configuration options are available in [dspace]/config/modules/signposting.cfg.  For most sites, the default settings should be all you need.