I decided to use DSpace in Young Digital Planet to store assets we use in our educational materials. Neither DC nor DC Terms is suitable for our metadata. We have to use LOM and deal with its hierarchical structure as I see currently DSpace supports only flat schemas. I've noticed "Hierarchical Metadata Support" is on your road map as "Candidate Features for DSpace 7.0 - Priority 2". As it's very important use case for us, we'd like to work on this feature now.
Support for LOM and MODS make that functionality DSpace significantly expand. We will be open for new standards.
Use LOM matadata in DSpace
Idea to solve this problem is to add hierarchical information to both metadatafieldregistry and metadatavalue tables - it resolve LOM issue. Also we have to create two new tables
and to support MODS. Simple Adjacency List Model would be sufficient, as metadata trees won't be very high.
<lifeCycle> <Contribute> <Role> <string> author </string> </Role> <Entity> <string> entity1 </string> </Entity> <Entity> <string> entity2 </string> </Entity> <Date> <string> 2005-01-01 </string> </Date> </Contribute> <Contribute> .... </Contribute> </lifeCycle> |
<name type="personal"> <namePart>Alleman, Tillie Pierce [1848-1914]</namePart> <role> <roleTerm type="code" authority="marcrelator">aut</roleTerm> <roleTerm type="text" authority="marcrelator">Author</roleTerm> </role> </name> |
Solution:
I'm new in DSpace topic but I see that I have to make changes in following areas:
1. dspace-api
2. dspace-rest
3. dspace solr configuration
There are many details lacking in our solution description, but for now, we'd like to hear your opinion: Am I going in the right direction?
I have also other questions: