Contribute to the DSpace Development Fund

The newly established DSpace Development Fund supports the development of new features prioritized by DSpace Governance. For a list of planned features see the fund wiki page.

This is a priority identified by the October 2011 community survey on improving metadata support authored by the DSpace Community Advisory Team at the request of the DSpace Committers/Developers. DCAT has summarized and interpreted the information gathered from the survey estimated level of effort required. DSpace community members should feel free to add more detailed explanation/examples to further flesh out the changes/requirements they would like to see. It is recommended that a community project team be formed around this work.   

Project Description

  • Use the "Other" field to specify which standards  

    : 
    • need metadata expert to help define "Other" standards
    • XML based schemas will be more complex since DSpace doesn't support XML (i.e., MODS)
    • Hierarchal metadata:
      • add functionality / move towards relational aspect functionality - like MODS (although MODS implemenation might be better done following some DSpace/Fedora intergration work since it is XML)
      • allow relationships between community/collection/bitstream metadata
      • possible iterative solution: create functionality that emulates hierarchal behavior
      • examples: 
        • adding in author affiliation
        • metadata on bitstream - related back to items

Estimated Effort Level Required

LEVEL OF COMMUNITY EFFORT: likely medium to high
LEVEL OF DEVELOPER EFFORT: likely medium to high

Project Team

If you would like to participate or lead this project team, please identify yourself here and/or send a message to the dspace-tech mailing list. 

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4 Comments

  1. Jacob Andersson

    Our National Library has recently issued metadata requirements (for example author affiliation) which makes the use of hierarchical metadata necessary.

  2. Alexander Ekvall

    Yes, to be able to attach metadata to authors is a crucial feature for us.

  3. Christophe Dupriez

    As demonstrated by http://www.windmusic.org it is possible to create special collections for authors, subjects, publishers, etc, (each record having all desired metadata), collections that then serve as authority list for cataloguing documents' records. This was explained at DSUG 2009 ( https://gupea.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/21341 ) without echo by the community. Since a year, there is an ASKOSI thesaurus plugin for the current DSpace version which provides many of the controlled vocabulary functions of WindMusic (which remains DSpace 1.41). You need the ASKOSI Jar to collect vocabularies where they are (SQL databases including the DSpace one, CSV files, SKOS/RDF files, SPARQL servers, etc.) and make them available to all Tomcat applications including DSpace. More precisely, in dspace.cfg, you declare all your fields as being controlled by ASKOSI thesaurus plugin, you name the effective vocabularies for each field in the input form and you configure the SKOS sources in a dedicated directory.

    http://www.destin-informatique.com/ASKOSI/Wiki.jsp?page=install

    What is still missing is an indexation plugin for DSpace enabling to add to indexes all synonyms and broader terms of each records' keywords based on information returned by the authority control plugin (like in WindMusic).

    1. Jacob Andersson

      Thank you, I will definately take a look at this.

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