Good afternoon,

In the Netherlands, we’re working on overhauling our current (OAI-PMH) aggregation infrastructure towards a more distributed model. The aim is to create a comprehensive collection of digitised cultural heritage objects held by GLAMs across the country. A major component of the new infrastructure is a register with collections. We are using CKAN as the data management system for these collections.

We are currently installing and configuring CKAN, and use DCAT for describing datasets. We are interested in seeing other examples of registries that describes digital heritage collections using the CKAN software. One of the challenges we encounter is describing multi level datasets like collection and sub-collections in the context of DCAT. An example is a data provider in the Netherlands that provides an aggregated oral history dataset for target audience ‘oral history’. We registered this aggregated dataset, but we also want to register individual collections for participating organisations. Therefore, the aggregated dataset is divided into parts using xpath, xslt, etc.. Now we want to explicitly mark the dataset parts as being a sub-dataset and vice versa.

Question to this community, do you have implementations that use a CKAN based registry for digital heritage collections, have you also dealt with this issue to describe sub-collections in DCAT? How did you manage this?

Your help is much appreciated,

Best wishes,

Johan Oomen
Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision
@johanoomen