AFITA/9th AOS workshop: Presentation on the AGRIS plugin for DSpace

4. DSpace DSpace was created as digital repository with the objective of storing, indexing, preserving and disseminating an organization's research material in digital formats. MIT and Hewlett Packard Company designed the system between 2000 and 2002

5. DSpace contd DSpace integrates a user community orientation into the system’s structure. This design supports the participation of different communities such as universities, research institutes, International Organizations, departments and any other unit of research institutions. As their requirements might be different, DSpace allows the workflow and other policy related aspects of the system to be customised.

7. DSpace Repositories DSpace is OAI compliant and thus bibliographic records can be easily harvested by service providers for inclusion into their systems. Bibliographic resources are described with qualified Dublin Core (DC) metadata. By default only 3 fields (title, language and date) are mandatory. Dspace focuses on Repository Management and is weak in Metadata Management However, DSpace can be customized to use other application profiles for metadata like the AGRIS AP used for the description of documents in the domain of agriculture.

9. Semantic Metadata Metadata standards such as AGRIS AP and Knowledge Organization Systems as AGROVOC thesaurus provide mechanisms for sharing information in a standardized manner by recommending the use of common semantics and interoperable syntaxes.

10. Subject Indexing in DSpace Amongst other fields there is the subject field, where it is possible to describe the resource with one or more subject keywords and choose from a vocabulary, where the keyword/s has been taken from, for example the AGROVOC thesaurus.

11. DSpace Repositories One problem! In DSpace, currently there is no control on the subject keywords. This leaves lots of freedom for the choice of subject keywords and thus inconsistent use, which will eventually make interoperability on the level of subject difficult.

12. Practical Objective The objective of this project is to develop a plug-in for DSpace that seamlessly integrates into DSpace for making use of rich metadata format and controlled vocabularies.

13. How to change DSpace To develop least invasive code changes either in the form of patches or plug-ins or add-ons. The features we offer are - of generic nature , so that if DSpace community finds them useful, there will be a likelihood of releasing our modifications with the official release of DSpace. The advantage of such an approach is that whenever a new version of DSpace is released, we do not have to work and distribute the AGRIS specific patches

14. Implementation Phases The customization of the DSpace in four phases: Phase 1. AGRIS AP metadata implementation; AGROVOC in SKOS, using local SKOS file. Phase 2. AGROVOC in OWL; possibility to use the same structure for the authority control of corporate bodies, journals, serials (in both, SKOS and OWL format). Phase 3. Accessing AGROVOC using webservices Phase 4. And last but not least, spell checking and tooltip for help on each submission.

15. Implementation: Submission Process In DSpace the submission process incorporates all the elements suggested in the AGRISAP, which includes mandatory elements -- many elements are associated with language information also

18. Outlook We still aim to release the AGRIS plugin for DSPACE within the year But as this has been until now a “no budget” project......