xEAC pre-production release ready for wider testing

xEAC (https://github.com/ewg118/xEAC), an open source, XForms-based framework for the creation and publication of EAC-CPF records (for archival authorities or scholarly prosopographies) is now ready for another round of testing. While xEAC is still under development, it is essentially production-ready for small-to-medium collections of authority records (less than 100,000).

xEAC handles the majority of the elements in the EAC-CPF schema, with particular focus on enhancing controlled vocabulary with external linked open data systems and the semantic linking of relations between entities. The following LOD lookup mechanisms are supported:

• Geography: Geonames, LCNAF, Getty TGN, Pleiades Gazetteer of Ancient Places
• Occupations/Functions: Getty AAT
• Misc. linking and data import: VIAF, DBpedia, nomisma.org, and SNAC

xEAC supports transformation of EAC-CPF into a rudimentary form of three different RDF models and posting data into an RDF triplestore by optionally connecting the system to a SPARQL endpoint. Additionally, EADitor (https://github.com/ewg118/eaditor), an open source framework for EAD finding aid creation and publication can hook into a xEAC installation for controlled vocabulary as well as posting to a triplestore, making it possible to link archival authorities and content through LOD methodologies.

The recently released American Numismatic Society biographies (http://numismatics.org/authorities/) and the new version of the archives (http://numismatics.org/archives/) illustrate this architecture. For example, the authority record for Edward T. Newell (http://numismatics.org/authority/newell), contains a dynamically generated list of archival resources (from a SPARQL query). This method is more scalable and sustainable in the long run than using the EAC resourceRelation element. Now that SPARQL has successfully been implemented in xEAC, I will begin to integrate social network analysis interfaces into the application.

More information:

• Github repository: https://github.com/ewg118/xEAC
• XForms for Archives, a blog detailing xEAC and EADitor development, as well as linked data methodologies applied to archival collections: http://eaditor.blogspot.com/
• xEAC installation instructions: http://wiki.numismatics.org/xeac:xeac