Hi Lisa, this is one thing that the DSpace data model simply doesn't capture at the moment, so making it work will either require ugly hacks or a lot of work. You did your homework and found those cases. Depending how much you've already invested in DSpace, it might be wiser to look at Fedora Commons instead, which supports relationships between objects (at least so I've heard).
That said, this is something we really need to implement. In fact, we just talked about it last week. In the best-case scenario, it will be in DSpace 4.0, most probably in a later release. On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 8:28 PM, Lisa Walley <lwal...@mbl.edu> wrote: > Have other options come to light with the latest release? Unfortunately not. > Is there a better way to capture classes of items and relationships? They could be modelled in RDF (I believe this is what Fedora does). But there's no support for that in DSpace. You could have the RDFs as bitstreams, or in some kind of a separate triplet store. Prepare for a lot of work. > What role could controlled vocabularies play in this context? That's part of the ASKOSI approach. Think of it as authorities for all kinds of objects. To make sure you don't have duplicate objects describing the same real-world thing. > If a thing, like a "Course" doesn't specifically have a bitstream is it > appropriate to store it as an 'item', or should it be a 'collection'? It's completely fine to have it as an item, whatever suits you. No need for an item to have bitstreams. The disadvantage of collections is that they don't have metadata (but se below), so you can model only hierarchical relationships. > Is it possible to add custom metadata to collections in order to define > types of collections? Only the few "static" metadata you can see in the Edit collection interface (the "collection" table columns). No flexible metadata like currently on items. But I'll do everything to change this in 4.0 and let all DSpaceObjects (e.g. collections, bistreams, epersons) have the same kind of metadata like items. > What if the only information we have for a "Person" is a name, should this > be stored as an 'item' or should we be using a controlled vocabulary? The case of persons is special in that DSpace has direct support for it - authorities. So how proficient are you with Java and how much effort are you willing to invest in this during the next 6 months? You might make a difference in what will be in DSpace 4.0 if you start early (now). Regards, ~~helix84 Compulsory reading: DSpace Mailing List Etiquette https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSPACE/Mailing+List+Etiquette ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Free Next-Gen Firewall Hardware Offer Buy your Sophos next-gen firewall before the end March 2013 and get the hardware for free! Learn more. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sophos-d2d-feb _______________________________________________ DSpace-tech mailing list DSpace-tech@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dspace-tech List Etiquette: https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSPACE/Mailing+List+Etiquette
