Extended Linked Data Controlled Vocabulary in xEAC and EADitor

Getty TGN

Last week, the Getty announced the latest installation of their linked open data vocabularies: the Thesaurus of Geographic Names. Like the previously released AAT, the TGN is available through a SPARQL endpoint. After returning from the Semantic Technology and Business conference in San Jose (which I have discussed in another blog post), I set out to integrate TGN lookups into the various cultural heritage data frameworks that I'm developing.

Both xEAC and EADitor have been extended to enable lookups of the Getty TGN through their editing interfaces. The functionality is identical to the occupation and function lookups in both systems. 1. The user performs a text search for a term, 2. the XForms engine submits a SPARQL query to the Getty endpoint, and 3. the user then selects the appropriate item from a list generated from the SPARQL response. See the example from xEAC, below:

The geographic lookup mechanism in xEAC also includes an option for geographic names in the Library of Congress Name Authority File.

 

SNAC Integration

In addition to extending the geographic lookup functionality in both EADitor and xEAC, I have also implemented a SNAC lookup in both applications. With the addition of two URL parameters, the search results page in SNAC can provide the raw cross query XML response instead of the default HTML. I hope that SNAC will eventually provide a documented search API that returns results in a more formal standard, like Atom.

In xEAC, the lookup will embed the SNAC URI into the otherRecordId and source in the EAC-CPF control. Nothing else is pulled from SNAC at the moment, either into the EAC record or into the public user interface, although this could change eventually.

In EADitor, the persname, corpname, and famname element components have been extended to include the SNAC lookup in addition to VIAF and xEAC (if a xEAC instance has been added into the EADitor settings). The SNAC URI is stored in the @authfilenumber of the associated EAD element.

SNAC URIs that are embedded into EAD finding aids (like the URIs from other linked open data vocabulary systems) will be included in the RDF serialization of the archival collection data. This may pave the way for users of EADitor to make their content accessible through SNAC, or whatever international archival entity system evolves from SNAC, by means of linked open data technologies.