Entry for the Developer Challenge OR2010

Talat Chaudhri and Stephanie Taylor submitted an entry to the Developer Challenge at Open Repositories 2010 in Madrid, which was received with some interest because it used Open Calais to automatically create links to related content. This “quick and dirty” entry was made at the last minute, so only the main features worked. It comes out of UKOLN’s work in creating a new, interactive Drupal site (soon to be launched) as a focus for their work on various metadata activities, including but not limited to application profiles, aimed at providing a hub of user-facing, community documentation. The demand for such a central focus of metadata information was raised separately at the first meeting of the Metadata Forum.

Drupal, RDFa and the “fauxpository”

Drupal 7 is likely to be released soon, and will include native support for RDFa. The RDF module for Drupal 6 already allows this functionality. Why is this important? Because it makes relationships between resources much easier to describe through Drupal’s user-friendly interface and, in the process, would allow documents to be available as linked data.

In Drupal terminology, a “node” is effectively a metadata record, and various Drupal modules enable the easy customisation of metadata. In effect, you could build a repository on the basis of Drupal, by-passing the need for platform-specific knowledge tied to open source software that has increasingly moved towards the “enterprise solution” space, along with all of the technical tie-in that it usually entails. For the service provider, it is not dissimilar to the tie-in experienced with commercial software, especially in the case of information librarians or other professionals who are not developers, or even developers are not part of that particular open source development team.

Application Profiles are essentially structured metadata comprising elements and (usually) relationships, and are therefore inherently linked data solutions. They vary in complexity according to their particular functional requirements: for instance, in the world of scholarly publications, there is a spectrum between the straightforward, unstructured way that DSpace implements Dublin Core (which should perhaps be called the DSpace Application Profile), the simplified FRBR structure of the Scholarly Works Application Profile (SWAP) and the complex entity-relationship model of CERIF, the standard developed for Current Research Information Systems (CRISs). This latter is a de facto application profile, even if it is not normally referred to as such.

Why should Drupal be any better than the repository platforms that already exist? In many ways, it depends on what you need to do with it, and on the resources at your disposal. But the advantage is that Drupal is a flexible Content Management Framework that is designed to be leveraged for any sort of content, and for new modules to be designed easily for new purposes. After all, what does a repository actually do that other websites cannot? They put metadata records and bitstreams (the actual documents or files) on the Web, and add a few additional services such as OAI-PMH, SWORD and statistics. But repositories are only a particular specialised subset of content management systems. Drupal is accessible to any PHP developer without any initial requirement of particular specialist platform knowledge, which is relatively easy to obtain. The community is large and support is quite easily available, as are modules that can be adapted for local purposes. It is designed to be easy to customise and theme.

Sarah Currier recently talked about the idea of a “fauxpository”. If I remember correctly, she pointed out that it could even be based on WordPress. This is clearly a workable idea, although hardly suitable for production use as a university service. I would maintain that Drupal could easily be suitable for such a use with relatively little work, and could make use of and adapt application profiles in a way that the major open source repository platforms have been slow to do, and are still only just beginning to enable as something of an afterthought. UKOLN are investigating how Drupal can be used to make it possible to make use of the JISC’s Dublin Core Application Profiles (DCAPs), and using Drupal is intended to show how it can work independently of tie-in to any specific platforms.