Archives Hub EAD to RDF XSLT Stylesheet

Please note: Although this is the ‘final’ formal post of the LOCAH JISC project, it will not be the last post. Our project is due to complete at the end of July, and we still have plenty to do, so there’ll more blog posts to come.

User this product is for: Archives Hub contributors, EAD aware archivists, software developers, technical librarians, JISC Discovery Programme (SALDA Project), BBC Digital Space.

Description of prototype/product:

We consider the Archives Hub EAD to RDF XSLT stylesheet to be a key product of the Locah project. The stylesheet encapsulates both the Locah developed Linked Data model and provides a simple standards-based means to transform archival data to Linked Data RDF/XML. The stylesheet can straightforwardly be re-used and re-purposed by anyone wishing to transform archival data in EAD form to Linked Data ready RDF/XML.

The stylesheet is available directly from http://data.archiveshub.ac.uk/xslt/ead2rdf.xsl

The stylesheet is the primary source from which we were able to develop data.archiveshub.ac.uk, our main access point to the Archives Hub Linked Data. Data.archiveshub.ac.uk provides access to both human and machine-readable views of our Linked Data, as well as access to our SPARQL endpoint for querying the Hub data and a bulk download of the entire Locah Archives Hub Linked Dataset.

The stylesheet also provided the means necessary to supply data for our first ‘Timemap’ visualisation prototype. This visualisation currently allows researchers to access the Hub data by a small range of pre-selected subjects: travel and exploration, science and politics. Having selected a subject, the researcher can then drag a time slider to view the spread of a range of archive sources through time. If a researcher then selects an archive she/he is interested in on the timeline, a pin appears on the map below showing the location of the archive, and an call out box appears providing some simple information such as the title, size and dates of the archive. We hope to include data from other Linked Data sources, such as Wikipedia in these information boxes.

This visualisation of the Archives Hub data and links to other data sets provides an intuitive view to the user that would be very difficult to provide by means other than exploiting the potential of Linked Data.

Please note these visualisations are currently still work in progress:

• Science
• Politics
• Travel and exploration

Screenshots:

Data.archiveshub.ac.uk home page:

Screenshot of data.archiveshub.ac.uk homepage

Prototype visualisation for subject ‘science’ (work in progress):

Locah Visualisation for subject ‘science’

Working prototype/product:

http://data.archiveshub.ac.uk/ead2rdf/

There are a large number of resources available on the Web for using XSLT stylesheets, as well as our own ‘XSLT’ tagged blog posts.

Instructional documentation:

Our instructional documentation can be found in a series of posts, all tagged with ‘instructionaldocs‘. We provide instructional posts on the following main topics:

• Data modelling
• Finding, using and creating vocabularies
• Designing URI patterns
• Transforming data into RDF/XML and other formats (e.g. using XSLT)
• Thoughts on architecture and workflows for exposing data as Linked Data.
• Creating Linked Data views (e.g. using the Paget Framework)
• Querying Linked Data using Sparql
• Opportunities and barriers arising from producing and using Linked Data

Project tag: locah

Full project name: Linked Open Copac Archives Hub

Short description: A JISC-funded project working to make data from Copac and the Archives Hub available as Linked Data.

Longer description: The Archives Hub and Copac national services provide a wealth of rich inter- disciplinary information that we will expose as Linked Data. We will be working with partners who are leaders in their fields: OCLC, Talis and Eduserv. We will be investigating the creation of links between the Hub, Copac and other data sources including DBPedia, data.gov.uk and the BBC, as well as links with OCLC for name authorities and with the Library of Congress for subject headings.This project will put archival and bibliographic data at the heart of the Linked Data Web, making new links between diverse content sources, enabling the free and flexible exploration of data and enabling researchers to make new connections between subjects, people, organisations and places to reveal more about our history and society.

Key deliverables: Output of structured Linked Data for the Archives Hub and Copac services. A prototype visualisation for browsing archives by subject, time and location. Opportunities and barriers reporting via the project blog.

Lead Institution: UKOLN, University of Bath

Person responsible for documentation: Adrian Stevenson

Project Team: Adrian Stevenson, Project Manager (UKOLN); Jane Stevenson, Archives Hub Manager (Mimas); Pete Johnston, Technical Researcher (Eduserv); Bethan Ruddock, Project Officer (Mimas); Yogesh Patel, Software Developer (Mimas); Julian Cheal, Software Developer (UKOLN). Read more about the LOCAH Project team.

Project partners and roles: Talis are our technology partner on the project, providing us with access to store our data in the Talis Store. Leigh Dodds and Tim Hodson are our main contacts at the company. OCLC also partnered, mainly to help with VIAF. Our contacts at OCLC are John MacColl, Ralph LeVan and Thom Hickey. Ed Summers is also helping us out as a voluntary consultant.

The address of the LOCAH Project blog is http://archiveshub.ac.uk/locah/ . The main atom feed is http://archiveshub.ac.uk/locah/feed/atom

All reusable program code produced by the Locah project will be available as free software under the Apache License 2. You will be able to get the code from our project sourceforge repository.

The LOCAH dataset content is licensed under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 licence.

The contents of this blog are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.

LOCAH Datasets

LOCAH Blog Content

Locah Code

Project start date: 1st Aug 2010
Project end date: 31st July 2011
Project budget: £100,000

LOCAH was funded by JISC as part of the #jiscexpo programme. See our JISC PIMS project management record.