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The most sites on the Internet are oriented towards human consumption. While HTML may be a good format to create websites it is not a good format to export data in a way a computer can work with. Like the most software for repositories DSpace support supports OAI-PMH as an interface to export the stored data. While OAI-PMH is well known in the field of repositories it is purely rarely known elsewhere (e.g.e. Google retired its support for OAI-PMH in 2008). The Semantic Web is an approach to publish data in on the Internet together with information about its semanticsemantics. The W3C released standards like RDF or SPARQL to help to bring data into the web for publishing structured data on the Web in a way computer computers can easily work with. The data stored in repositories are is particularly suited to be used in the Semantic Web, as metadata are is already available. They do not It doesn’t have to be generated or entered manually for publication as Linked Data. For the most repositories, at least for every Open Access Repositoryrepositories, it is quite important to share the their stored content. Linked Data is a rather big chance for repositories to present their content in a way it can easily be accessed, interlinked and (re)used.

To my knowledge, EPrints is currently the only repository software I know, that is able capable to export its content as RDF. Nevertheless EPrints , the software ignores some important conventions around regarding Linked Data, so I would speak for RDF and not of meaning it rather provides  RDF than Linked Data.

The main topics of my thesis (for german capable readers, they can be found on the Internet: http://www.pnjb.de/uni/diplomarbeit/repositorien_und_das_semantic_web.pdf) were how metadata and digital objects stored in repositories can be woven into the Linked (Open) Data Cloud and which characteristics of repositories have to be considered while doing so. As main part of my thesis I created a software independent concept on how to provide repositories repository contents as Linked Data. I developed a proof of concept implementation of this concept as extension of DSpaceIn addition, I implemented it as a DSpace extension. There are only some last steps left to be done before this implementation it can be used in a productive environment and . I would be glad if to contribute it would be added to to a future release of DSpace as soon as it's ready.

German native speakers can find my thesis here: http://www.pnjb.de/uni/diplomarbeit/repositorien_und_das_semantic_web.pdf

dspace-rdf

dspace-rdf is an extension for DSpace that adds capabilities to convert contents stored in DSpace into RDF, to store the converted data in a Triple Store and to provide it in serializations of RDF. As the Triple Store must support SPARQL 1.1 it can be used to provide the converted data over an SPARQL endpoint. dspace-rdf can currently be found on my github repositoriy, but I would be glad to contribute it to a future version of DSpace.

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