Introduction

Exchanging repository contents

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 supports OAI-PMH as an interface to export the stored data. While OAI-PMH is well known in the field of repositories it is rarely known elsewhere (e.g. Google retired its support for OAI-PMH in 2008). The Semantic Web is an generic approach to publish data on the Internet together with information about its semantics. The W3C released standards like RDF or SPARQL for publishing structured data on the Web in a way computers can easily work with. The data stored in repositories is particularly suited to be used in the Semantic Web, as metadata is already available. It doesn’t have to be generated or entered manually for publication as Linked Data. For most repositories, at least for Open Access repositories, it is quite important to share 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.

Terminology

We don't want to give a full introduction into the Semantic Web and its technologies here as there can by found many on the web. Nevertheless we want to give a short glossar about the terms used most often in this content to make the following documentation more readable.

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Starting with DSpace 5.0 DSpace supports to provide stored contents as Linked (Open) Data.

Architecture / Concept

Installation

Configuration

Maintenance