ShareVDE:Activities

This section is a summary of Share-VDE 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 members only.

Useful documentation

For new members, useful tools and information describing the main procedures and practicalities to get on board Share-VDE can be found in the Share-VDE onboarding set.

To have an overview of the major documents currently under analysis, see the document summary. Some of the documents listed are under revision, as they stem from the initial Research and Development phase of Share-VDE.

The section Share-VDE working groups outlines the main goal for each group, the current members and the practical info to participate in each work strand.

Latest achievements

The following activities track the major progresses in order to make Share-VDE evolve, as sketched in the presentation of the initiative.

As of September 2021, the new version Share-VDE 2.0 is live at https://svde.org with an enhanced Entity Discovery Portal and Linked Data Management System. The previous version at https://share-vde.org/ will be active in parallel to Share-VDE 2.0 until the migration of libraries' data on the new system will be completed. The load of Share-VDE libraries’ data is being done progressively and currently the new web portal hosts a subset of the data available on the previous version. If you want to discover the advanced functions of Share-VDE 2.0, the web portal at https://svde.org is the place to go. The press release announcing the latest achievements is also available.

To provide feedback on the new version, report bugs and suggestions reach out through the forum https://forum.svde.org/.

Roadmap and team organisation

The roadmap of the technical activities running in parallel for the new version of SVDE 2.0 and in the Share Family of initiatives is available on a Miro board. This mid-term roadmap shows the many work strands intertwined in the SVDE initiative and the sister projects and has been created with the tool for online shared boards called Miro. To access the board in view mode click on the link above. Given the format of the board, you need to zoom in to see the details of the various activities on the timeline (rows and columns cannot be frozen). It spans over 2020 and 2021, listing the major areas of developments without technical details.

The numerous upgrades to the back-end and front-end infrastructures (see below) brought to the SVDE linked data management and entity discovery system 2.0 supported by the new version of the LOD Platform, that is the technology framework of the Share Family of initiatives.

The SVDE 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. Five main development sub-teams:

• Infrastructure & Architecture
• SVDE Backend (Database and Indexing, APIs development)
• SVDE Frontend (Frontend components, APIs development, SVDE portal and J.Cricket search functions)
• APIs for Penn and other skin portals
• J.Cricket Cluster Knowledge Base editing functions

Overview of major developments

As far as the frontend infrastructure, the new SVDE 2.0 portal (www.svde.org) has been completed and its design was enhanced by the activities around the J.Cricket Cluster Knowledge Base editor, the requirements for the University of Pennsylvania localisation and for the Kubikat-LOD parallel project. Based on this enhanced prototype, SVDE IT team is working on connecting the new components of the frontend of the SVDE platform with the backend infrastructure and also with the ad hoc localisation for the University of Pennsylvania. The other skin portals foreseen are being prepared.

A complex diagram of the frontend development project has been created and will be used to generate and display SVDE portal and the connected skin portals and tenants such as Kubikat-LOD, Penn’s localisation, the other skin portals etc. The naming of the infrastructure components in the diagram are arbitrary and respond to the metaphor of a big forest: it’s a way to avoid ambiguity within the various development teams working on SVDE. The names of the skins and tenants for users outside the development teams will reflect the names of the institutions. Please note that it’s a work in progress populated with a few placeholder data for demonstrative purposes; for this reason it might be unstable, it reflects the search and navigation functions though.

As far as the backend infrastructure, the enhancements of the new user interface increased the dependencies between the features specific to each localisation of the SVDE frontend (i.e. SVDE general interface, Penn localisation, J.Cricket module, Kubikat-LOD project etc.) and the underlying system components common to all of them, for example the search logic. This implied the revision of the SVDE backend infrastructure that is now supported by a complex API layer.

Moreover, the Cluster Knowledge Base is being enhanced with new attributes and new controlled vocabularies as a result of the UI design and the revision of the backend infrastructure.

Initial ideas for the implementation of the tenant infrastructure are being exchanged. Data from libraries of the Share Family would be grouped by similar domains or characteristics in ad hoc tenants of the software architecture. This would enable each tenant to manage the data independently, allowing in the same time an infrastructure for potential data exchange services.

Parallel work is being done on the Kubikat-LOD localisation of art libraries: Samhæng has designed the advanced specific prototype with ad hoc features, that is available here https://bit.ly/Kubikat_UI_2020-07-16, and SVDE IT team will implement Kubikat-specific features. This is the result of the joint work of the Kubikat group of libraries that are envisaging a new tool for scholars, researchers and end users as well as for librarians to manage bibliographic resources.

SVDE team has been working on the procedure to fully automate the workflow for receiving updated MARC data from all SVDE member institutions. After the initial import of the MARC full catalogue of SVDE libraries done in 2019, the procedures for the ingestion in SVDE of subsequent regular updates of MARC data have been created and constantly refined for processing, enrichment and clustering in SVDE. The process has been tested using records from a few SVDE libraries that contributed to this test phase and we have set up an automated workflow for collecting regular updates of MARC records.

The import of the full catalogues of the National Library of Norway and of the National Library of Finland has been impacted by the entity model discussion that is being carried on in the Sapientia Entity Identification Working Group.

SVDE participates to Linked Data for Production 3 project with two major tasks:

1. build two-ways flow APIs to connect SVDE and Sinopia BIBFRAME cataloguing module. The first step has been done, i.e. the Sinopia team has built an API pipeline that pulls records built by Sinopia and the functioning has been tested by the SVDE team. Moreover, SVDE has analysed Sinopia documentation on the structure of records output from Sinopia: this will be the basis for SVDE to build the connector to import Sinopia records in SVDE. The initial sketch of how SVDE is envisaging to close the loop is available;
2. provide the conversion and housing of PCC data in an ad hoc PCC data pool working as autonomous tenant, with a separated enriched CKB and ad hoc PCC URIs with dedicated namespace. SVDE has delivered PCC records converted in BIBFRAME for the initial load of approx 4.5 million MARC bibliographic records created by PCC libraries; regular updates are ongoing, on a monthly basis, for the duration of LD4P3.

The SVDE team is working on the development of the authority services, based on the analysis carried on by the working groups. The initial release of the authority control features has been delivered to Stanford University Libraries.

Members' activities with the SVDE team

The British Library, the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution officially joined SVDE. The list of SVDE members can be consulted at Share-VDE institutions.

The continuous cooperation between the SVDE IT team and the working groups of SVDE libraries brought several important results.

In the context of the SVDE AIMS-CKB working groups, SVDE has prepared the ground for J.Cricket Cluster Knowledge Base Editor and authority services developments: the design of the editor module has been completed as far as functions for user interaction with the module itself (see an example of the function merging two author clusters in one). SVDE IT team is currently working on a detailed analysis of authentication and permission functions. This is key for J.Cricket editing functions (e.g. definition of roles for users and actions that they can perform), but it’s also functional to SVDE in general as far as interaction with other skin portals/tenants is concerned.

Also, the analysis of authority services has been completed within the AIMS working group and SVDE team is analysing the integration with Wikidata and ISNI. Connected to authority services and interaction between SVDE and external sources, the PCC has launched the PCC Wikidata pilot. This pilot can be beneficial to SVDE interaction and data exchange with Wikidata, and Casalini Libri is taking part in the pilot with reference to SVDE, see the project page on Wikidata Casalini Libri. SVDE-Wikidata Interaction.

The revision of the entity model with the Sapientia Entity Identification (SEI) working group is a major achievement: SVDE model is a four layered adaptation of BIBFRAME comprising the entities svde:Opus | svde:Work | svde:Instance | svde:Item. This structure ensures interoperability with other environments using LRM-based models or pure BIBFRAME models.

Among the Share Family of library driven initiatives a new working group has started dedicated to the practical cooperation among the National Bibliographies. Considering the important presence of several National Libraries in the Share-VDE community and in the broader network of institutions that follow the progress of this initiative and of other Linked Open Data projects, this working group has been launched in order to study and address the needs of National Libraries and institutions that hold National Bibliographies in the framework of a shared entity discovery environment such as the Share Family of initiatives.

Current goals

Our focus for 2021 is on the enhancement of the Share-VDE back-end infrastructure and front-end components and on some major areas of developments for the Share-VDE 2.0 linked data management system and entity discovery portal:

• the linked data entity editor J.Cricket, 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.;
• the enrichment of the entity model with further attributes and properties and the expansion of the clusters of entities as outcome of the dedicated Sapientia Entity Identification working group;
• further progresses on the developments of skin portals and SVDE localisations;
• continuously feeding the PCC data pool with regular updates of PCC records converted to linked data;
• the enhancement of the automated interaction between SVDE and Sinopia editor by building API pipelines.

To track back previous progresses, the summary of SVDE achievements over 2019 is also available.

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.

Screenshot from the internal calendar of events monitored by the Library Community Events sub-group