Domain Model

Introduction

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 Clusters: The Genesis

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 Cluster: 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

Prism Status List

Status Code	Description	Locking?
SV or Null/Empty	Saved	No
ED	Edit	No
MS	Merge Source (the prism is part of a merge list as merge source)	Yes
MD	Merge Destination (the prism is part of a merge list as merge destination)	Yes
SG	Split Giver	Yes
SR	Split Receiver	Yes
NV	Invalidated	Yes
RN	Review Needed	Yes

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"
            }
        ]
    }
  }
}

The request/response above depicts an interaction between an anonymous (i.e. read-only) requestor and Share-VDE. In case the client has write permissions (e.g. it is associated to a svde-editor or svde-editor-advanced), for each provenance it's possible to get information about users (belonging to that provenance) that are working on that cluster. The request includes in this case a "status" field:

{
  person(uri: "https://svde.org/agents/201") {
    uri
    name
    provenances {
      uri
      description
      status {
            statusCode
            user {
                username
                fullName
            }
        }
    }
  }
}

The response contains now the information about three users that are editing that cluster:

{
  "data": {
    "person": {
        "uri": "https://svde.org/agents/201",
        "name": "Carroll, Luiss",
        "provenances": [
            {
              "uri": "https://svde.org/agents/UALBERTA",
              "status": [
                {
                  "statusCode": "ED",
                  "user": {
                    "username": "agazzarini",
                    "fullName": "Andrea Gazzarini"
                  }
                },
                {
                  "statusCode": "ED",
                  "user": {
                    "username": "mbranca",
                    "fullName": "Max Branca"
                  }
                }
              ]
            },
            {
              "uri": "https://svde.org/agents/BL",
              "status": []
            },
            {
              "uri": "https://svde.org/agents/STANFORD",
              "status": [
                {
                  "statusCode": "ED",
                  "user": {
                    "username": "fzancan",
                    "fullName": "Federico Zancan"
                  }
                }
              ]
            }
        ]
    }
  }
}