User:Meichau/TEI Demonstrator

MPDL = Basic Concept = The TEI demonstrator is one of DARIAH's user-oriented, clickable demonstrators. It is complimentary to other experiments in DARIAH, including the ORE experiment. Its focus is on user feel (rather than collection management or the technical backend), and it demonstrates:


 * embedding DARIAH in the user's daily enviroment
 * creating virtual collections over distributed sources (DARIAH sources or not)
 * integration of heterogeneous resources

= Data Architecture =

Source Types
In collecting and fetching the sources given by the user, the TEI Demonstrator should generally differenciate between


 * Known Sources
 * Other Sources

Known Sources are thereby sources with a known and defined data structure. To define a source as Known Source the TEI Demonstrator furthermore should have a data retrieval method implemented for this source.

Any source that doesn't match this conditions is defined as are Other Source.

Referencing Sources
All data objects collected by the user are referenced by their URL. These references should be stored at the TEI Demonstrators data set.

The data object might be automatically or manually enriched with metadata. Thereby the MIME-type might be fetched automatically for any source. Additionally the wider metadata set of known sources is fetched by the according algorithms. All fetched metadata values might be overridden by manually added values.

To ensure the unchanged state of the referenced data objects according mechanisms (i.e. hash values) should be applied.

Data Object Relations
Two data objects might be have different kinds of relations to each other. They might either reference or be part of each other. These triples could be stored as RDF statements of


 * dcterms:isPartOf for hierarchy triples and
 * dcterms:references for other object relations.

Hierarchical relations might be set up by defining new data objects that are used as containers for the collected objects. Annotations might be given to any relations.

Virtual Collections
The set of all collected data objects including references, metadata, relations and annotations build a virtual collection. Virtual collections might be


 * fetched (fetching all available metadata from known and other sources including unchanged state information)
 * persisted (setup of persistent data objects)
 * saved (saving all persistent data objects of a virtual collection and their relations to each other)
 * released (publishing of a virtual collection)

= User Interface =

Bookmarklet
The Scholar collects data objects in thew internet during his daily work by just clicking on the TEI Demonstrator bookmarklet in his browser. The bookmarklet thereby collects the URL of the actual page and maybe a timestamp and a hash value.

Personal Workbench
The TEI Demonstrator offers the ability to create virtual collections of data objects collected via the bookmarklet. It offers a plain list based resource view and a graphical view. In both views the demonstrator is seperated in two parts - a list of all collected data and the "Personal Workbench", which offers a working enviroment to sort, arrange, group and relate the collected data objects.

In either views all data objects collected via the bookmarklet are displayed at the top of the page. To work with these data objects, the user can set up a new or load a saved virtual collection. All data objects are represented by graphical objects like MIME-type based icons, object thumbnails (i.e. Image thumbnails or webpage-screenshots) or a framed metadata sets. The user can add or remove these data objects to the virtual collection by simple graphical object interactions like clicking or dragging.

At the "stage" of the personal workbench the user can easily sort, arrange or group data objects by dragging their graphical representations. Clicking on a editing icon at these graphical representations should open a more detailed view of the object including all of its metadata and tools to fetch and edit those. Additional tools from a toolbar at the personal workbench should offer the ability to set up relations between two data objects. These relations should be displayed as arrows between the objects. Annotations might be added to any relation. For hierarchical relations the idea of a stack-like representation of the parent objects with a hidden sub-stage for all children objects should be taken into consideration.

The user should be able to save, persist and release virtual collections. Any saved collection should reopen in exact the same arrangement as the user saved it. Additionally the Demonstrator might offer a automatic arrangement according to a non-visible grid based on the collections data structure.