Hi all,
I'm looking for guidance on the best way to capture relationships between items
in DSpace so that I can store types of things and relationships between types
of things. We are currently using 1.8 but could upgrade to the latest version
if that offers more options in this regard.
My use case is to capture information related to a course (in educational
context). For example, we have bitstreams that include course photographs,
syllabus etc. we also have people associated with the course e.g. instructors,
students. Those people in turn may or may not have bitstreams associated with
them e.g. photographs, articles etc.
In a relational system I would be thinking about having a "Course" and a
"Person" class and defining relationships between these classes. I have read
that DSpace does not manage relationships very well but that one possible
solution (described here
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg14400.html) is
to create items with a type value and use metadata e.g. dc.relation with
qualifiers to capture the relationships. Have other options come to light with
the latest release?
A number of questions are running through my head at this point which I'll list
below, any links to further reading or implementation examples (e.g. Kim
Sheperd and Stuart Lewis's approach
https://conferences.tdl.org/or/OR2011/OR2011main/paper/viewFile/397/160 or the
windmusic.org ASKOSI http://www.askosi.org/dspaceSKOS/DestinSKOS.pdf approach)
would be much appreciated.
Is there a better way to capture classes of items and relationships?
What role could controlled vocabularies play in this context?
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'?
Is it possible to add custom metadata to collections in order to define types
of collections?
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?
Many thanks in advance for your help.
Kind regards,
Lisa
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