Repositories and the Semantic Web
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 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.
To my knowledge, EPrints is currently the only repository software capable to export its content as RDF. Nevertheless, the software ignores some important conventions regarding Linked Data, meaning it rather provides RDF than Linked Data.
The main topics of my thesis 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 repository contents as Linked Data. In addition, I implemented it as a DSpace extension. There are some last steps left to be done before it can be used in a productive environment. I would be glad to contribute it 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.
dspace-rdf is realized as a new module of DSpace as it contains a webapp and everyone should be able to decide for its own if this webapp should be deployed or not.
