On Mar 6, 2014, at 9:47 AM, Mark A. Matienzo <mark.matie...@gmail.com> wrote:

> ArchivesSpace has a REST backend API, and requests yield a response in
> JSON. As one option, I'd investigate to publish linked data as JSON-LD.
> Some degree of mapping would be necessary, but I imagine it would be
> significantly easier to that instead of using something like D2RQ.


If I understand things correctly, using D2RQ to publish database contents as 
linked data is mostly a systems administration task:

  1. download and install D2RQ
  2. run D2RQ-specific script to read a (ArchiveSpace) database schema and 
create a configuration file
  3. run D2RQ with the configuration file
  4. provide access via standard linked data publishing methods
  5. done

If the field names in the initial database are meaningful, and if the database 
schema is normalized, then D2RQ ought to work pretty well. If many archives use 
ArchiveSpace, then the field names can become “standard” or at least “best 
practices”, and the resulting RDF will be well linked. 

I have downloaded and run ArchiveSpace on my desktop computer. It imported some 
of my EAD files pretty well. It created EAC-CPF files from my names. Fun. I 
didn’t see a way to export things as EAD. The whole interface is beautiful and 
functional. In my copious spare time I will see about configuring ArchiveSpace 
to use a MySQL backend (instead of the embedded database), and see about 
putting D2RQ on top. I think this will be easier than learning a new API and 
building an entire linked data publishing system. D2RQ may be an viable option 
with the understanding that no solution is perfect.

— 
Eric Morgan

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