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SKOS Name Authority
This presentation will start with our design goals for a new user interface, include a demonstration, and describe the simple techniques used to provide a more integrated view of Symphony and ILLiad patron data. The backbone of the actual application includes light-weight use of Zend studio for PHP and integration of the eXtensible Catalog’s NCIP Toolkit to reach out to Symphony for patron data. In addition, we can talk about our successes (and difficulties) using jQuery Mobile to create a mobile view using the same underlying code as the web version. As one of our first Shibboleth applications here in the Libraries, this experience also taught us first-hand about some of the challenges of this type of single sign-on.
== SKOS Name Authority in a DSpace Institutional Repository ==
* Tom Johnson, Oregon State University, thomas.johnson@oregonstate.edu
Name ambiguity is widespread in institutional repositories. Searching by author, users are typically greeted by a variety of misspellings and permutations of initials, collision between contributors with similar names, and other problems inherent in uncontrolled (often user-submitted) data. While DSpace has the technical capacity to use controlled names, it relies on outside authority files (from LoC, for example) to do the heavy lifting. For institutional authors, this leaves a major coverage gap and creates namespace pollution on a vast scale (try searching [http://authorities.loc.gov authorities.loc.gov] for "Johnson, John", sometime).
OSU is solving this problem with an institutionally scoped, low maintenance SKOS/FOAF "name authority file". People in the IR are assigned URIs, names are maintained as skos:prefLabel, altLabel, or hiddenLabel. We've developed a simple Python application allowing staff to update individual "records", and code on the DSpace side to access the dataset over SPARQL. This presentation will walk you through where we are now, limitations we've run into, and possibilities for the future.
[[Category:Code4Lib2013]]