Concept and art direction of the LOD Platform Entity Discovery Portal
The LOD Platform Entity Discovery Portal has been designed in a joint effort of the Share Family staff and member institutions, to respond to both patrons and library staff requirements and expectations, to reflect the components of the underlying data model infrastructure, and to provide an intuitive user experience.
It is designed to be easy to navigate. The structure and design of the system encourages browsing and exploring. The interface makes it quick and easy to jump from entity to entity until the user finds what they are interested in exploring.
For more details and visual representations, consult the LOD Platform Entity Discovery Portal UX guide, describing the concept, functions and components of the Entity Discovery Portal and its user experience.
Start anywhere — explore from there
The user interface consists of two primary kinds of pages:
1. Search pages
Search pages let users search for content and filter down results until they find something they want to explore in more detail.
2. Entity pages
Entity pages make up the bulk of the Entity Discovery product. Whenever a user clicks a search result, they will find themselves on an entity page. A user can also find themselves on an entity page by following a URL (the entity URI) presented by an external site (eg. a search engine result) or held in an external dataset (eg. References to entries in a shared dataset of another library, Wikidata, etc.).
Entities can have different types, such as Agent, Work, Subject (including Topic, Place and Event) or Publication (which is a logical grouping of BIBFRAME Work and BIBFRAME Instance properties, for providing a better understanding to end users). The system makes it easy to navigate between entity pages because the design of each entity page has been built around presenting all related content in an easy-to-use manner. This means that the user can, through the Simple Search or Advanced Search functions, open up an entity anywhere in the data grid and, from there, jump to parent, children or sibling nodes in the grid.
In addition to providing user display and interaction, an entity page will deliver machine readable capabilities. These are of two types:
- Embedded structured data. Each page will have embedded within its HTML markup a structured data description of the entity it represents. The description will consist of one or more JSON-LD encoded tags using the Schema.org vocabulary. This data will be utilised by search engines and others to provide enhanced listings and links, etc. This means that these collections will be more readily discoverable via popular search engines such as Google when users are seeking relevant information.
- Linked Open Data provision. Following Linked Open Data and web content negotiation principles, requests to the entity URI requesting RDF specific data formats such as (RDF-XML, Turtle, Tripples, Quads, JSON-LD) will receive data in that form instead of HTML.
Direct connections
Each entity page lists its directly connected entities. These are defined as certain entity types with a certain relationship to the entity in question. Whenever these entities exist, an exhaustive list of them will be available from the entity page. These might be e.g. on a Work page lists of: Agents who created this work; Agents who are subjects of this work; Instances (Publications) of this work, etc.
Indirect connections
In addition to listing exhaustive lists of related entities, the interface will often also show links to indirectly linked entities in the UI. These can be shown as exhaustive lists or individual links. Examples of this are: A list of “Related Subjects” on an Agent page, listing the Subjects of the Works of that agent; or a link to the creator Agent of the Work, on the page of an Item (these are not directly linked, but they are conceptually related because of the hierarchical relationship between Work and Instance).
Breadcrumb links
In addition to direct and indirect links, the breadcrumb bar appears in the UI on certain entities to visualize the conceptual or perceived hierarchy between Agents › Works › Instances › Items. The breadcrumb makes it easy to quickly move up this conceptual hierarchy to the conceptual parent or grandparent entity (e.g. moving from an Instance to the creator Agent of the Work).
Filtering
On each entity page, as well as on search results pages, filters are shown to make it easy to narrow down the data at hand.
Art direction principles
The art direction of is focused on two things: making linked data easy to understand and easy to use for library users. While maintaining simplicity in the UI, we guide the user through the complex data grid underlying the system.
In addition to keeping the UI simple, we have prioritized the following:
1. Conceptual data presentation
In general, we represent the entities in the UI in a way this intuitively makes sense. I.e. even if a certain piece of metadata technically belongs on the Item level, we may show it where relevant on the Instance level (e.g. physical location).
2. Conceptual hierarchies
We represent conceptual hierarchies in the UI where relevant (e.g. in the breadcrumb or in the choice of metadata).
3. Encouraging exploration
We designed the interface to encourage users to jump from one entity to another, encouraging exploration and discovery rather than only searching for known items. We believe this is a good way to create a new kind of experience and to make use of the nature of the linked data grid.
4. Accessible layout
We design the system to be usable and accessible. This includes supporting:
- Input sources
- Keyboard navigation and shortcuts
- Mouse and trackpad
- Touch screens
- Screen readers
- Color themes, e.g. Dark theme
