Virtual Sets: Separate the internal repository structure from the navigation structure

dspace-xmlui

Currently, Dspace’s hierarchical structure allows to share items between collections by explicitly declaring these relations on each item. However, DSpace does not allow to relate a collection or sub-community between two or more communities.

Virtual Sets are arbitrary aggregations of Dspace Objects and criterias, composed of:

• arbitrarily selected communities, collections and/or items,
• dynamic results from criterias/queries (logical expressions. e.g. SOLR queries)
• other declared Virtual Sets (initially, cycles are not allowed)

Virtual Sets in DSpace would allow the creation of complex navigation structures regardless of the hierarchical (perhaps administrative) structure of communities and collections.

Structures, as described above, are supported in at least another repository software such as Fedora-based Hydra due to its generic object model.

 The initial implementation would affect the dspace-xmlui component. However, further extensions of this implementation would at least involve the modification of the dspace-api component too, possibly implementing the Virtual Sets as DSpace Objects to offer more orthogonal features like Virtual Sets backup, export and exposure through OAI-PMH.

Related links: 

• Sets, sets or sets?