Monday, October 19, 2009

Interoperability Between Institutional Data Repositories: a Pilot Project at MIT

Kate McNeill from MIT pointed me to this interesting paper from the IASSIST Quarterly: Interoperability Between Institutional Data Repositories: a Pilot Project at MIT. (PDF format)

As Kate mentioned to me, this paper describes a tool which transformed DDI-format XML into METS, and it would be well worth exploring if this tool could be used in some way to support a deliverable on our EAGER grant: a tool which transforms DDI-format XML into FOXML.

Fedora supports several ingest formats, including METS and its own native FOXML, and so if there is already a tool that generates METS, that would be a good starting point for a FOXML version. Further, an interesting science experiment would be to take DDI, transform it both into METS and FOXML, ingest both objects, and see how if they would differ in any significant manner.

2 comments:

  1. Bryan,

    I would like to clarify that the work refered to here was work I did a couple years ago focused primarily on transforming VDC / Dataverse centric datasets into DSpace Items. It combined XSLT transformation and DSpace's LNI (Lightweight Network Interface) to create an agent that could be run to import VDC items into DSpace. The primary objective was to create an archival copy of MIT work stored in VDC in MIT's institutional repository.

    You may find examples of those items here:
    http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/39119

    The application does support separate "Reader" and "Serializer" plug-ability. So one could implement serializers for Fedora. We could adjust the code to work as well with SWORD or another ideal strategy would be to write an adapter to work with Fedoras REST API and be less Format specific.

    Cheers,
    Mark Diggory

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for the additional info, Mark!

    ReplyDelete

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