Comments on: User testing for SWAP

By: Talat Chaudhri

Talat Chaudhri — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:32:08 +0000

In fact, I’ve just read in a reply from Mark Diggory that an “E-R driven data model” is exactly what is intended for DSpace 2.0, which is an important development. It’s unclear of course why the 1.6 development is going on in parallel and how the two will differ. This is very confusing for the repositories community.

A further issue is how earlier records will be migrated to a more complex data model.

By: Talat Chaudhri

Talat Chaudhri — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 11:43:11 +0000

Hi Rachel,

Just visited FIZ Karlsruhe for the eSciDoc Days, about a platform that you probably know is based on Fedora. This useful experience brought your comment back to mind.

Recent SWAP/DCAP work here at UKOLN has made it fairly obvious that neither DSpace nor EPrints – especially not the former, which currently has no native ability to relate documents at all – can support any application profile that relies on direct representation of the entity-relationship model in its data model. This would have to change in the next version of DSpace to become a reality, which I hope is what your news will represent. The situation may be affected by DuraSpace developments.

The practical upshot is that only Fedora can probably use the present form of SWAP and the other DCAPs. A major strand of our current work is to find alternative implementation methods for repositories with simpler data models that does not lose the relationships implied by any given entity-relationship model. At present, of course, this is FRBR.

We aim to provide practical demonstrations that others will be able to reproduce and implement in their own repositories using a variety of methods. So please watch this space for forthcoming developments.

By: Rachel Bruce

Rachel Bruce — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:03:24 +0000

Thanks Talat.
Just a quick note: we (JISC) have just heard that DSpace now supports SWAP – confirmation of how far it does is still to follow but as identified a while back we needed repository software to support the AP for wider adoption. So this seems like a step towards that. As part of the JISC repositories programme we have funded some DSpace development and the support of SWAP was one of the requirements.