DSpace 2.0 Demonstration

Abstract

During the last 9 months, the DSpace 2.0 development team has been working on solutions to drastically improve the data model for DSpace. In this presentation, the impact of the improvements to the data model will be presented in the first public demo of the DSpace 2.0 functionality.

The new DSpace 2.0 Data Model is significantly more generic than the DSpace 1.x Data Model and is focused on providing a solution to the observed shortcomings and recommendations that have been made by the community. The model offers storage of metadata properties on all of its model entities, providing a more flexible environment to describe and organize content.

Initiatives to express structured metadata such as Dublin Core, OAI-ORE, FoaF, Bibliontology and DCMI Application Profiles (including SWAP) provide a suite of clearly defined concepts for describing relationships between dspace entities, while information models such as the DCMI DescriptionSetProfile provide a theoretical and practical basis for describing and constraining structured graphical metadata. We are working to assure that DSpace 2.0 is designed in a manner that will support for the creation and management of complex structural metadata compatible with these initiatives.

The demo will focus on three areas of improvements in DSpace 2.0. Firstly, the demo will show the flexibility of the data model, using an example set of entities and a set of relations between the entities. Secondly, the concept of metadata properties will be illustrated by editing an entity to attach new metadata properties. Finally, the demo will show file uploading to illustrate relationships between those files and other entities.

While DSpace 2.0 design and development is not yet complete, we feel this demonstration will reflect that the work completed to date will provide a firm foundation for the new architecture.