DSpace Items
The functionality is largely inspired by the SOLR official de-duplication approach, for each item one or more signatures are computed using pluggable implementation.
A signature is a value that summarize the information in the item using a pluggable transformation (case insensitive, ascii transcription, identifier normalisation, etc), out of box implementation based on a normalization of a single metadata (such as an identifier or the title) or a combination of metadata (such as title + year, etc.) are included.
Two items are flagged as potential matches if they share at least one signature.
Feedback on potential matches (reject or duplicate flag) are stored in the database table dedup_reject
Signatures and matched groups are computed when an item is updated and stored on a dedicated SOLR core this make extremely fast and lightweight to check for potential duplicate. This SOLR core is maintained using DedupEventConsumer a script DedupClient is provided to rebuild the index or build it the first time if you are migrating from a previous version.
Two functionalities have two point of interaction with the users
- During the submission and the workflow, the potential duplicates are presented and feedback from the submitter and validator are collected (see deduplication alert)
- An administrative dashboard is available to the administrator to check for existent duplicates and merge group of items (see The administrative UI)
CRIS Objects
A batch script is provided to merge different instances of a cris object in a single one. The script works on any kind of entity (researcher profiles, organisation units, projects, etc.) with the following rules
- any items linked to the merged cris object will be linked to the target cris object
- any cris objects linked to the merged cris object will be linked to the target cris object
- properties and nested object present only in the merged cris object are copied to the target. The parameters allow fine grain control about which properties copy and override.
usage: ScriptMergeCrisObject
-d,--delete delete merged objects, the default (without
the -d option) is to disable them
-h,--help help
-m,--merge <arg> CRIS ID(s) to merge into the target (use
multuple m if needed - merge occurs
respecting the order from left to right)
-p,--replace_notempty <arg> properties to override in the target with
the values from the merged objects IF NOT
EMPTY
-r,--replace <arg> properties to override in the target with
the values from the merged objects
-s,--skip properties to ignore during the merge
-t,--target <arg> CRIS ID to retain (merge target)
-x,--exclude Don't merge properties, only move link from
the merged object to the target
USAGE:
ScriptMergeCrisObjects -t <crisID> -m <toMergeCRIS-ID1> m <toMergeCRIS-ID2> .. m <toMergeCRIS-IDn> [-r propR1 -r propR2... -r propRN] [-p prop1 -p prop2... -p propN] [-s]
