A Compound Object Authoring and Publishing Tool for Literary Scholars Based on the IFLA-FRBR Model

This paper presents LORE (Literature Object Re-use and Exchange), a light-weight tool which is designed to allow literature scholars and teachers to author, edit and publish compound information objects encapsulating related digital resources and bibliographic records. LORE enables users to easily create OAI-ORE-compliant compound objects, which build on the IFLA FRBR model. It also enables them to describe and publish them to an RDF repository as Named Graphs. Using the tool, literary scholars can create typed relationships between individual atomic objects using terms from a bibliographic ontology and attach metadata to the compound object. This paper describes the implementation and user interface of the LORE tool, as developed within the context of an ongoing case study being conducted in collaboration with AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource, which focuses on compound objects for teaching and research within the Australian literature studies community. 1 This paper is based on the paper given by the authors at the 4th International Digital Curation Conference, December 2008; received July 2008, published October 2009. The International Journal of Digital Curation is an international journal committed to scholarly excellence and dedicated to the advancement of digital curation across a wide range of sectors. ISSN: 1746-8256 The IJDC is published by UKOLN at the University of Bath and is a publication of the Digital Curation Centre. A Compound Object Authoring and Publishing Tool 29 Introduction and Background Within the discipline of literature research and teaching, the ability to relate disparate digital resources in a standardized, machine-readable format has the potential to add significant value to distributed collections of literary resources. Such compound objects can be used to: track the lineage of derivative works which are based on a common concept or idea; or to relate disparate objects that are related to a common theme; or to encapsulate related digital resources for teaching purposes. For example, one might want to relate the original edition of Patrick White’s Voss to the illustrated edition, a radio recording and a digital version of the film – and enable them to be retrieved and presented, with their relationships visualized, regardless of their location. Our objective is to provide a tool to enable such an encapsulation and subsequent re-use and visualization, by building on the efforts of two previous digital library initiatives: • The IFLA Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) (International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions [IFLA], 1998); • The OAI-Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) (Lagoze & Van de Sompel, 2007). The ability to easily share and exchange such compound mixed-media digital objects will facilitate collaborative eScholarship and discussion amongst researchers of literature generally. The Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) is a 1998 recommendation of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) to restructure catalog databases to reflect the conceptual structure of information resources. It uses an entity-relationship model of metadata for bibliographic resources that supports four levels of representation: work, expression, manifestation and item. It also supports three groups of entities: products of intellectual or artistic endeavour (publications); those entities responsible for intellectual or artistic content (a person or corporate body); and entities that serve as subjects of intellectual or artistic endeavour (concept, object, event, and place). OAI-ORE is an international collaborative initiative, focusing on an interoperability framework for the exchange of information about digital objects between cooperating repositories, registries and services. OAI-ORE aims to support the creation, management and dissemination of the new forms of composite digital resources being produced by eResearch and to make the information within these compound digital objects discoverable, machine-readable, interoperable and reusable. Named Graphs (Watkins & Nicole, 2006) are endorsed by the OAI-ORE initiative as a means of publishing compound digital objects that clearly states their logical boundaries. When applied to compound objects, the nodes in the Named Graph correspond to the individual aggregated resources, and the arcs correspond to typed relationships between those resources. In the terms of the OAI-ORE, compound objects correspond to ORE aggregations, and the Named Graphs that describe them to 2 Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange http://www.openarchives.org/ore/ The International Journal of Digital Curation Issue 2, Volume 4 | 2009 30 Anna Gerber & Jane Hunter ORE resource maps. Resource maps and their component nodes and arcs are all web resources which can be identified and unambiguously referenced by HTTP URI handles, thus providing a basis for reuse and exchange. Our hypothesis is that OAIORE Named Graphs (Jeremy, Bizer, Hayes & Stickler, 2005) provide the ideal mechanism for representing literary compound objects that encapsulate the entities and relationships expressed by the IFLA FRBR. They do this in a way that is disciplineindependent but which provides hooks to include rich semantics, metadata and discipline-specific vocabularies, ontologies and rules. In developing LORE, we aim to apply OAI-ORE to eScholarship within the discipline of Australian Literature through a case study involving the creation, exchange and re-use of compound digital objects for the purposes of teaching and research within the Australian literature studies community. In addition, the LORE services enable users to label the nodes and arcs within an OAI-ORE compound object using an ontology of classes and relationships which is based on the IFLA FRBR, but extended to support new types of entities and relationships, specific to certain subcommunities.