The University of Queensland

School of ITEE

eResearch Group

Abstract

This document defines a profile of the Atom Syndication Format for describing research data and its context. The Atom representation allows description of research data collections, the agents that create and manage the research data, the activities that funded the data creation, and the services for accessing the data. The representation also supports description of the relationships between these entities.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

This profile of the Atom Syndication Format [RFC4287] supports syndication of contextual information about research data to software agents and user agents. It focuses on describing research entities and metadata that aid discovery and re-use of research data. It defines Atom entry document representations of:

• data collections,
• the agents that create and manage the data collections,
• the activities that funded the data creation, and
• the services for accessing the data and related entities.

This profile distinguishes between a research entity and the Atom entry describing the entity. It defines metadata for describing both.

Like Atom, this profile uses IRIs [RFC3987] to identify and link resources. It uses IRIs to identify research entities, to identify the Atom entries that describe research entities, and to define relationships between research entities.

This profile does not define methods for syndicating or processing Atom entries. The Atom entry documents described by this profile might be self-contained, or contained in Atom feed documents. User agents might retrieve an Atom entry document from a web server using HTTP, or embed an Atom entry document within an Atom Publishing Protocol message to create a web resource on a remote server.

1.1. Examples

A simple description of a research data collection:

<entry xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">

    <!-- data collection description -->
    <id>http://oztrak.uq.edu.au/collection/abc123</id>

    <link rel="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#type" href="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Collection" title="Collection"/>

    <title type="text">Location and temperature data for estuarine crocodiles on Cape York Peninsula
        measured using acoustic telemetry</title>

    <content type="text">Estuarine crocodile location and temperature observations recorded using
        acoustic telemetry since 2007 on Cape York Peninsula, Queensland, Australia. The data comes
        from sensors attached to more than sixty estuarine crocodiles. Variables measured include
        location, depth, environmental temperature and body temperature.
    </content>

    <link rel="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/page" href="http://www.uq.edu.au/eco-lab/index.html?page=39442"/>

    <category label="Zoology"/>
    <category term="Ecology"/>

    <author>
        <name>Dr Hamish Campbell</name>
        <email>hamish.campbell@uq.edu.au</email>
    </author>

    <!-- metadata about the description -->
    <link rel="self" href="http://oztrack.uq.edu.au/collection/abc123.atom"/>
    <updated>2010-10-08T05:58:02.781Z</updated>
    <source>
        <author>
            <name>OzTrack System</name>
            <uri>http://oztrack.uq.edu.au</uri>
        </author>
    </source>

</entry>

A more extensive description of the same research data collection that uses non-Atom elements to specify temporal and geospatial coverage:

<entry xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">

    <!-- data collection description -->
    <id>http://oztrak.uq.edu.au/collection/abc123</id>

    <link rel="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#type" href="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Collection" title="Collection"/>

    <title type="text">Location and temperature data for estuarine crocodiles on Cape York Peninsula
        measured using acoustic telemetry</title>

    <content type="text">Estuarine crocodile location and temperature observations recorded using
        acoustic telemetry since 2007 on Cape York Peninsula, Queensland, Australia. The data comes
        from sensors attached to more than sixty estuarine crocodiles. Variables measured include
        location, depth, environmental temperature and body temperature.
    </content>

    <link rel="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/page" href="http://www.uq.edu.au/eco-lab/index.html?page=39442"/>

    <category label="Zoology"/>
    <category term="Ecology"/>

    <author>
        <name>Dr Hamish Campbell</name>
        <email>hamish.campbell@uq.edu.au</email>
    </author>

    <rdfa:meta property="http://purl.org/dc/terms/temporal" content="start=2007-08" datatype="http://purl.org/dc/terms/Period"/>
    <georss:polygon>-10.5 140 -17 140 -17 145.5 -10 145.5 -10.5 140</georss:polygon>

    <!-- metadata about the description -->
    <link rel="self" href="http://oztrack.uq.edu.au/collection/abc123.atom"/>
    <updated>2010-10-08T05:58:02.781Z</updated>
    <source>
        <author>
            <name>OzTrack System</name>
            <uri>http://oztrack.uq.edu.au</uri>
        </author>
    </source>

</entry>

The following example has an Atom feed with two linked Atom entries describing a research data collection and its creator. The research entities are linked using the atom:author/atom:uri element in the collection description and the link[@rel="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/made"] element in the creator description.

<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
    <id>http://www.gpem.uq.edu.au/qcpr/aus-voting2010/feed</id>
    <title>Metadata: Mapping and Statistical Analysis of Voting Patterns at the 2010 Australia Federal Election On-line</title>
    <updated>2010-10-08T05:58:02Z</updated>
    <author>
        <name>Queensland Centre for Population Research</name>
        <email>qcpr@uq.edu.au</email>
    </author>
    <link rel="self" href="http://www.gpem.uq.edu.au/qcpr/aus-voting2010/feed.atom"/>


    <!-- collection -->
    <entry>
        <id>http://www.gpem.uq.edu.au/qcpr/aus-voting2010/data</id>

        <link rel="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#type" href="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Collection" title="Collection"/>

        <title type="text">Variables derived from the 2006 Census of Population & Housing and from voting
        results at Polling Booth Catchment level for the 2010 Australian Federal Election</title>

        <content type="text">This collection contains variables derived from the 2006 Australian census
        representing demographic and socio-economic characteristics of the population living in polling booth
        catchments. It also contains variables derived from voting results at the 2010 Australian federal election
        at the polling booth level.</content>

        <author>
            <name>Queensland Centre for Population Research</name>
            <email>qcpr@uq.edu.au</email>
            <uri>http://www.gpem.uq.edu.au/qcpr</uri>
        </author>

        <link rel="self" href="http://www.gpem.uq.edu.au/qcpr/aus-voting2010/data.atom"/>
            <updated>2010-10-08T05:58:02Z</updated>
    </entry>

    <!-- collecting agent -->
    <entry>
        <id>http://www.gpem.uq.edu.au/qcpr</id>

        <link rel="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#type" href=" http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Group " title="Group"/>

        <title type="text">Queensland Centre for Population Research</title>
        <content type="text">The Queensland Centre for Population Research undertakes pure and applied research
        and provides education and training in demography and population geography. The work of the centre focuses
        especially on demographic change at the local and regional level, both within Australia and overseas and
        encompasses theory, methodology and empirical analysis.</content>

        <link rel="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/mbox" href="mailto:qcpr@uq.edu.au"/>
        <link rel="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/page" href="http://www.gpem.uq.edu.au/qcpr"/>

        <link rel="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/made" href="http://www.gpem.uq.edu.au/qcpr/aus-voting2010/data"/>

        <link rel="self" href="http://www.gpem.uq.edu.au/qcpr.atom"/>
        <updated>2010-10-08T05:58:02Z</updated>
        <source>
            <author>
                <name>The University of Queensland</name>
                <uri>http://uq.edu.au</uri>
            </author>
        </source>
    </entry>
                        

1.2. Information model and related work

The ISO 2146 Registry Services for Libraries and Related Organisations standard influenced the choice of entities modelled by this profile. ISO2146 models collections, parties, activities and services. This profile models the same entities, but uses the FOAF vocabulary term “agent” [REF] the instead of the ISO 2146 term “party”.

The choice of metadata properties for describing each type of entity was influenced by:

• Registry Interchange Format-Collections and Services schema (ANDS RIF-CS) used by the Australian National Data Service. [REF] See the ANDS Content Providers Guide http://ands.org.au/guides/cpguide/cpgintro.html
• The VIVO ontology model for organizing and present information on people, research, and education activities. [REF] See VIVO: Connecting People, Creating a Virtual Life Sciences Community http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july07/devare/07devare.html

This Atom profile closely aligns with the OAI-ORE Resource Map Implementation in Atom [http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/atom]. It differs in some places to support distinct requirements, but also uses a different syntax for representing RDF statements. See section SOMETHING for a summary of the differences between this representation and the OAI-ORE Atom representation.

This profile can convey information about the provenance of Atom entries as they get syndicated between systems. It distinguishes between research entities and the metadata describing those research entities and defines metadata for describing the provenance of the descriptions themselves. This entity / description distinction owes much to the Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) Abstract Data Model http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/datamodel.html and to the How to Publish Linked Data on the Web tutorial document http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/pub/LinkedDataTutorial/

MENTION semantic web influence on the abstract model, use of vocabs shuch as FOAF and ANDS and VITRO and link and RDF realisation of this and GRDDL

1.3. Notational conventions

The keywords "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.

1.4. Conformance

2. Atom extensions

This profile makes the following extensions to the Atom specification.

2.1. Link Relations

This profile uses the atom:link element for a variety of purposes:

• to represent relationships between research entities
• to represent relationships between a research entities and web resources
• to represent the relationship between an Atom entry and the entity it describes
• to indicate the type of entity described by an Atom entry

This profile supports use of the following link relations in the rel attribute in the atom:link element:

IANA link relations

alternate

license

related

self

Properties from Dublin Core Metadata Terms vocabulary

http://purl.org/dc/terms/alternative

http://purl.org/dc/terms/isReferencedBy

http://purl.org/dc/terms/publisher

http://purl.org/dc/terms/spatial

http://purl.org/dc/terms/temporal

Properties from Dublin Core Collections Description Terms vocabulary

http://purl.org/cld/terms/isAccessedVia

Properties from the FOAF vocabulary

http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/currentProject

http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/familyName

http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/givenName

http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/mbox

http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/made

http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/page

http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/title

Properties from the ANDS-VITRO vocabulary REFERENCE NEEDED

http://www.ands.org.au/ontologies/ns/0.1/VITRO-ANDS.owl#hasOutput

http://www.ands.org.au/ontologies/ns/0.1/VITRO-ANDS.owl#hasParticipant

http://www.ands.org.au/ontologies/ns/0.1/VITRO-ANDS.owl#isManagerOf

http://www.ands.org.au/ontologies/ns/0.1/VITRO-ANDS.owl#isOutputOf

http://www.ands.org.au/ontologies/ns/0.1/VITRO-ANDS.owl#isSupportedBy

Properties from the VIVO ontology

http://vivoweb.org/ontology/core#fundedBy

Properties from the OAI-ORE Vocabulary

http://www.openarchives.org/ore/terms/describes

Properties from the RDF vocabulary

http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#type

2.2. GeoRSS elements

This profile uses two elements from the GeoRSS-Simple vocabulary http://www.georss.org/georss namespace to express geospatial metadata:

• georss:point
• georss:polygon

For example,

<entry xmlns:rdfa="http://www.w3.org/ns/rdfa#">
    ...
    <georss:polygon>-10.5 140 -17 140 -17 145.5 -10 145.5 -10.5 140</georss:polygon>
    ...
 <entry>

2.3. RDFa meta element

This profile uses the RDFa meta element from the http://www.w3.org/ns/rdfa# namespace to make metadata statements about the research entity described by an Atom Entry. For example,

<entry xmlns:rdfa="http://www.w3.org/ns/rdfa#"
    ...
    <rdfa:meta property="http://purl.org/dc/terms/accessRights"
               content="Contact the data curator regarding permission and procedures for accessing
                        the original data."/>
    ...
 <entry>

Note: at the time of writing, this method for embedding RDFa within Atom is stable, but still under development within the W3C.

3. Describing research entities

This profile uses the following elements to describe research entities. The tables below indicate how often an element MAY or MUST occur when describing particular types of research entity.

Namespaces used below are

3.1. Identifying research entities

The profile uses two elements to identify the entity described by the Atom entry.

The atom:id element contains a universal identifier for the entity. As per the Atom specification, this identifier MUST NOT change when the Atom document is syndicated between systems.

An atom:link element with a rel attribute of http://www.openarchives.org/ore/terms/describes contains an alternative, local identifier for the entity. This identifier MAY change when the Atom entry is syndicated, to convey a new local identifier for the entity. If this element does not exist, systems MUST infer that the local identifier is the universal identifier.

For example, the following elements contain a universal and a local identifier for a data collection.

<id>http://oztrak.uq.edu.au/collection/abc123</id>
<link rel="http://www.openarchives.org/ore/terms/describes" href="http://dataspace.edu.au/collections/1#"/>

3.2. Indicating research entity type

All Atom entries conforming to this profile MUST contain an atom:link element with a rel attribute of http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#type indicating the type of entity being described. For example,

<link rel="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#type" href="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Collection" title="Collection"/>

indicates that the Atom entry describes a Collection.

This profile supports the following atom:link attribute combinations when rel is http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#type

Data collections

href="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Collection" title="Collection"

href="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Dataset" title="Dataset"

Agents

href="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Person" title="Person"

href="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Group" title="Group"

Activities

href="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Project" title="Project"

href="http://vivoweb.org/ontology/core#Program" title="Program"

Services

href="http://www.e-framework.org/Contributions/ServiceGenres/Create" title="Create"

href="http://www.e-framework.org/Contributions/ServiceGenres/Generate" title="Generate"

href="http://www.e-framework.org/Contributions/ServiceGenres/Report" title="Report"

href="http://www.e-framework.org/Contributions/ServiceGenres/Annotate" title="Annotate"

href="http://www.e-framework.org/Contributions/ServiceGenres/Transform" title="Transform"

href="http://www.e-framework.org/Contributions/ServiceGenres/Assemble" title="Assemble"

href="http://www.e-framework.org/Contributions/ServiceGenres/Harvest" title="Harvest"

href="http://www.e-framework.org/Contributions/ServiceGenres/Search" title="Search"

href="http://www.e-framework.org/Contributions/ServiceGenres/Syndicate" title="Syndicate"

3.3. Descriptive information

Additionally, when the Atom entry describes a Person (an entity of type http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Person), the profile supports the following element encodings of FOAF terms:

3.4. Spatial and temporal coverage

3.5. Ownership and custodianship

<author>
    <name/>NAME</name>
    <email/>EMAIL</email>
</author>

3.6. Rights

3.7. Data collection relationships

3.8. Agent relationships

Note: an agent MUST participate in a "created" or "manages" relationship.

3.9. Activity relationships

3.10. Service relationships

6. Describing Atom entries

As well as describing a research entity, each Atom entry contains descriptive information about itself.

6.1. Entry identifier

Each Atom entry MUST include an atom:link element with a rel attribute of self, containing an identifier for the Atom entry itself. For example,

6.2. Entry provenance and rights

The following Atom elements contain metadata about the provenance and rights of the Atom entry itself.

<source>
    <id/>URI-FOR-SOURCE-SYSTEM/</id>
    <title/>SOURCE SYSTEM TITLE</title>
</source>

<source>
    <author/>
        <name>NAME</name>
        <email>NAME</email>
        <uri>NAME</uri>
    /</author>
</source>

<source>
    <link rel="http://purl.org/dc/terms/publisher"
    href="AGENT_URI" title="AGENT NAME"/>
<source>

<source>
    <rights>RIGHTS<rights>
</source>

<source>
    <link rel="license" type="Internet Media Type"
    href="LICENSE_URI"/>
<source>

7. Comparison with OAI ORE Atom representation

Mostly aligned. Key differences relate to representing the rights and authorship of the description itself:

• Rights for the description are in the source element rather than at entry element level; instead entry level rights elements pertain to the rights for the collection
• Description author is in the source element rather than at entry element level; instead entry level author pertains to authorship of a collection
• Do NOT need to define aggregated resources

Infer describes identifier from atom:id

RDFa, but only about the research entity, not about generic resources.

8. GRRDL mapping

9. Possible enhancements

10. References