xEAC beta 2014a ready for testing

I have finally gotten xEAC to a stage where I feel it is ready for wider testing (and I have updated the installation documentation). This has been a few months coming, since I had intended to release the beta shortly after MARAC in November. The xEAC documentation can be found here: http://wiki.numismatics.org/xeac:xeac

Features

• Create, edit, publish EAC-CPF documents. Most, but not all, EAC-CPF elements are supported.
• Public user interface migrated to bootstrap 3 to support mobile devices.
• Maps and timelines for visualization of life events.
• Basic faceted search and Solr-based Atom feed in the UI.
• Export in EAC-CPF, KML, and rudimentary RDF/XML. HTML5+RDFa available in entity record pages.
• Manage semantic relationships between identities (http://eaditor.blogspot.com/2013/11/maintaining-relationships-in-eac-cpf.html). Target records are automatically updated with symmetrical or inverse relationships, where relevant, and relationships are expressed in the RDF output. TODO: parse relationship ontologies defined in RDF (e.g., http://vocab.org/relationship/.rdf) for use in xEAC.

REST interactions

The XForms engine interacts with the following web services to import name authorities, biographical, or geographic information:

• VIAF lookup
• DBPedia import
• Geonames for modern places (placeEntry element)
• Pleiades Gazetteer of Ancient Places (placeEntry)
• Getty AAT SPARQL (occupation element) (http://eaditor.blogspot.com/2014/03/linking-eac-cpf-occupations-to-getty-aat.html)
• SPARQL query mechanism of nomisma.org in the UI (and extensible, generalizable lookup widgets)

When the OCLC linked data service supports queries by VIAF URI, I will create a lookup widget to provide lists of related bibliographic resources.

TODO list

I aim to improve xEAC over the following months and incorporate the following:

• Finish form: Represent all EAC-CPF elements and attributes
• Test for scalability
• Interface with more APIs in the editing interface
• Employ SPARQL endpoint for more sophisticated querying and visualization, automatically publish to SPARQL on EAC-CPF record save.
• Improve public interface, especially searching and browsing
• Incorporate social network graph visualization (see SPARQL, above)
• Follow evolving best practices in RDF, support export in TEI for prosopographies (http://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/Prosopography) and CIDOC-CRM.
• Interact with SNAC or international entity databases which evolve from it.