This section is a summary of Share-VDE and Share Family activities. If after clicking on a link to a page or a file you are requested to input your credentials, it means that the resource is available to Share-VDE and Share Family members only.
Useful documentation
For new members, useful tools and information describing the main procedures and practicalities to get on board can be found in the Members area section.
While the Public documentation section collects detailed information on the components and tools underlying the Share-VDE and Share Family technology.
The following activities track the major progresses in order to make Share-VDE evolve, as sketched in the presentation of the initiative.
- Share-VDE is live at https://svde.org with an enhanced Entity Discovery Portal and Linked Data Management System. The load of Share-VDE libraries’ data will be done progressively and currently the discovery portal hosts a subset of the data of member institutions. Developments are being carried on to move all the technological components to a full production state.
- Users external to Share-VDE are welcome to provide feedback on the discovery portal, report bugs and suggestions: reach out through the forum https://forum.svde.org/ or send a message to helpdesk@svde.org.
- The linked data entity editor JCricket has released in its first version: see the overview at ShareDoc:PublicDocumentation/LODPlatform/EntityEditor.
News and updates are periodically published on this wiki in an extensive Bulletin.
Community work and collaborations
We are very committed to encouraging the cooperation within the Share Family membership and with external parties, to demonstrate the invaluable benefit of being part of an initiative developed and driven by libraries and for libraries.
Working Groups
Working Groups are the backbone of Share Family activities, which are driven by input from member institutions in a joint effort with Share Staff. Being a community initiative, the goals and desired outcomes are defined by the participating institutions through active engagement in different working groups. These are guided by the Advisory Council, which plays a key role in shaping the future of the initiative and provides advice on how to develop use cases and establish priorities, and ensures communication among member institutions.
Each member institution has a seat in the Advisory Council and this governance model based on direct participation of member institutions steering the initiative represents one of the major strengths and core values of the Share Family.
Also, each community of institutions participating in the individual Share Family of initiatives can establish its specific governance group that determines the policy for the treatment and processing of the data.
Consortia and networks of institutions
Ongoing conversations with consortia representatives are underway to define the configurations of this innovative collaboration. As an example of this effort, the Share Family Executive Summary for Consortia offers additional insights into how the Share Family can assist consortia in transitioning to linked open data, providing valuable strategies and support. Approved by our Advisory Council, the document emphasizes Share Family’s pivotal role in aiding consortia in adopting linked data methodologies for enhanced collaboration. The Share Family aims to empower consortia with the tools and knowledge necessary to seamlessly integrate linked open data principles, fostering innovation and interoperability within consortia networks.
IFLA, Linked data and BIBFRAME communities
The Share Family team and member institutions continue to nurture the liaisons with the library information experts and linked data and BIBFRAME communities, to increase interoperability to the advantage of new bibliographic and linked data workflows and to enhance existing ones.
Tiziana Possemato participates in the IFLA Bibliographic Section through various working groups of this division, co-chairing with Annette Dortmund the National Bibliographies and New Technologies working group that will be dedicated to national bibliographies metadata and ICT technologies like AI, linked open data, the semantic web. This opportunity will also foster the interconnections of the Share Family National Bibliographies working group and the related tenant https://natbib-lod.org.
The exchanges with LD4P - Linked Data 4 Production will move towards establishing a permanent connection with the Sinopia BIBFRAME editor environment for the mutual exchange of data in BIBFRAME/RDF.
More broadly, Share-VDE takes part in the BIG - BIBFRAME Interoperability Group established to create guidelines for data exchange in BIBFRAME, thus expanding the methods and tools shared by linked data nodes for BIBFRAME interoperability.
Integration with third parties applications
The evolution of the Share Family technology encompasses the ability to mutually integrate the data produced by the LOD Platform with external systems, notably with local ILS and Library Service Platforms and authority sources.
As to ILS and LSP integration, it’s worth mentioning some advancements:
- the new authority services for MARC-based workflows – designed with SVDE AIMS Working Group and further input by Stanford University Library – have been completed and are available for institutions willing to test and use them;
- the integration of Alma circulation APIs for local library services is almost completed;
- the integration with the native BIBFRAME cataloguing editor Sinopia is progressing;
- the connection to FOLIO ILS has been into an ongoing pilots.
More information on this integration process can be found at ShareVDE:Activities/Integrations
As to integration with authority systems, several data sources are being investigated and in some cases the initial integration steps have been completed:
- LD4P Questioning Authority lookup tool;
- Wikidata for mutual enrichment of entity IDs (initial specifications were shaped by SVDE working groups);
- ISNI for mutual enrichment of entity IDs (initial specifications were shaped by SVDE working groups).
The resulting scenario will translate into an integrated, “hybrid” operational ecosystem, based on a variety of tools and diverse data sources including traditional workflows (eg. new authority services for MARC workflows) as well as advanced models for data exchange, eg. those envisaged above to simultaneously operate through JCricket and local BIBFRAME editors both within the Share Family system and locally.
The numerous upgrades to the back-end and front-end infrastructures over the years lead to an enhanced version of the LOD Platform, that is the technology framework of the Share Family of initiatives.
The Share IT team has been restructured and enlarged in order to cope with the increasing complexity of the developments, meet the needs of the community and interconnect with several projects. There are several development sub-teams devoted to the main components of the system:
- Infrastructure & Architecture (set-up and enhancement of the backbone of the system);
- Clustering module (continuous optimisation of the core components for data processing and aggregated entities creation);
- Backend APIs (Database and Indexing, APIs development for Share Family portals, JCricket backend functions);
- Frontend (design and creation of general frontend components, frontend of Share Family portals implementation and interaction with backend, JCricket front-end functions);
- BIBFRAME and RDF conversion (refactoring of the component that creates BIBFRAME / RDF data and that feeds triple store for SPARQL queries).
Current goals
Among many work strands that the Share Family development staff is involved in, the current focus is on the enhancement of the whole Share-VDE and Share Family infrastructure, including:
- the first version of the linked data entity editor JCricket, that will enable several actions on the clusters of entities saved in the SVDE Cluster Knowledge Base, including creation, modification, merge of clusters of works, of agents etc.;
- third parties integration through the automated interaction between SVDE and external ILS/LSP such as Alma, FOLIO and Sinopia;
- the creation of a SVDE ontology as outcome of the dedicated Sapientia Entity Identification working group;
- further progresses on the developments of new tenants, skin portals and SVDE localisations;
- continuously feeding the PCC data pool with regular updates of PCC records converted to linked data.
To read the latest updates issued to the Share Family community and track back previous progresses, see the Share Family News and updates page.
Events and conferences
Share-VDE fosters the participation of its members to conferences, events and initiatives of interest for the community. The dedicated sub-group Library Community Events monitors the events in the library community and evaluates which ones are appropriate to submit to. The aim of this group is to put SVDE member libraries in the foreground as the protagonists of SVDE initiative itself, share outcomes, disseminate results and possibly expand the SVDE community as an effect of the group activity.
An internal calendar is continuously updated with the relevant events (see below) and the output of participation to initiatives, events and presentations are collected in the section dedicated to articles and resources.
