The Share-VDE Domain Model

Introduction

Share-VDE manages a complex domain composed by several entities. That results in a complex graph of interconnected entities that can be queried and used by external requestors through a rich set of public APIs. The purpose of this section is to describe what a requestor can do in terms of API in order to interact with Share-VDE.

At the heart of the system there's a complex domain model, as depicted in the following diagram:

The domain is composed by functional and technical entities, meaning with that a simple classification where we denote as

"functional" those entities that are part of the Share-VDE Core Domain Model (e.g. Agents, Opuses, Works, Instances, Items)
"technical" those entities required by some technical constraint in order to enrich the core entities with additional information (e.g. Collections, Facets, Pagination metadata).

Knowledge Base, Tenants, Provenances

Share-VDE manages a Knowledge Base which consists of clustered, integrated and enriched entities. In Share-VDE, a tenant is represented by a set of institutions contributing to the same Knowledge base.

An institution Pn within a tenant is called provenance. We use that term because we always want to retain the relationship between Share-VDE entities and data that originally contributed to their building.

Multiple Tenants? The Share-VDE Family

Multiple tenants form the Share Family. Family members interoperate through a centralised registry.

Share-VDE Entities

In the following diagram we depicted a high-level overview of the clusters genesis process.

Starting from the left side we have:

A tenant composed by n institutions (P1...Pn)
Institutions contribute with their raw data (e.g. bibliographic records, authority records)
The Share-VDE clusters are created in the Knowledge Base by means of an automatic process we simply call "clustering"

The Share-VDE Entity: The Prism

Each Share-VDE cluster is the result of merging contributions from several sources, including a special enrichment for linking external sources (e.g. VIAF, ISNI).

We like to imagine a cluster like a prism, which is a whole unit and at the same time it retains several faces (the contribution of each source). See the following diagrams for a visual explanation

API Perspective

Each cluster type has a "provenances" field associated which, as the name suggests, indicates the provenances that contributed to that cluster definition.

Here's an example of a request which asks for a specific Person and its provenances:

{
  person(uri: "https://svde.org/agents/201") {
    uri
    name
    provenances {
      uri
      description
    }
  }
}

In the response below we clearly see the Share-VDE cluster for Luiss Carroll has been contributed by 3 institutions: Stanford, Alberta and British Library.

{
  "data": {
    "person": {
        "uri": "https://svde.org/agents/201",
        "name": "Carroll, Luiss",
        "provenances": [
            {
                "uri": "https://svde.org/agents/STANFORD",
                "description": "Stanford University"
            },
            {
                "uri": "https://svde.org/agents/BL",
                "description": "British Library"
            },            
            {
                "uri": "https://svde.org/agents/UALBERTA",
                "description": "University of Alberta"
            }
        ]
    }
  }
}