Software, Data & APIs

Data model

The data model behind AGATE closely follows the CERIF standard of the euroCRIS. Since AGATE in it's inital phase concentrates on the research projects from the European Academies, a subset of CERIF focusing on projects, persons and organisational units is employed.

[CERIF] allows for a (metadata) representation of research entities, their activities / interconnections (research) and their output (results) as well as high flexibility with formal (semantic) relationships, enables quality maintenance, archiving, access and interchange of research information and supports knowledge transfer [...].Main features of CERIF, Link: eurocris.org/taskgroup-cerif/private-articles/main-features-cerif

One of the main components of AGATE's data model is it's fine grained classification system. The system allows for the structuring of Academy research projects in several taxonomies (disciplinary, digital methods) and project dimensions (type, funding, location, time, geography, use of open data licenses etc.). For the disciplinary classification, the taxonomy from the German Research foundation has been integrated. For classifiying the digital methods, research activities and research objects, TaDiRAH (Taxonomy of Digital Research Activities in the Humanities) is used.

Persistent Identifiers, Open Data and Semantic Web

AGATE has a strong focus and commitment to Open Data. All content and research data in AGATE is licensed for free reuse under a Creative Commons licence CC BY 4.0. In future project iterations it is planned to open up and link the data in AGATE to other repositories and resources on the Semantic Web. As a foundation for this, a persistent identifier scheme has already been implemented. For the first time research projects from the European Academies can be cited stable and durable using an AGATE identifier. An AGATE identifier always follows this structure:

https://agate.academy/id/PR.1

You will find the persistent identifiers in the detail view of a project directly below the project title. Citing this identifier in your papers will always bring the reader to the detail page of a given project in AGATE. Once we have finished the AGATE API, content negotiation will be implemented on the AGATE identifiers (URIs) enabling further possibilities for use in web applications.

APIs in the making

Our team is currently working hard to implement a standardized CERIF API to the AGATE data as soon as possible. The REST-API will allow to access the data in AGATE according to the CERIF XML standard. Besides this API we plan to implement a SPARQL endpoint and an Open Search API for directly accessing and searching AGATE from within the browser.

CMS Software

The research software for AGATE is developed by the Digital Academy, the Digital Humanities research departement of the Academy of Sciences and Literature | Mainz. The project database is implemented using the powerful TYPO3 Content Management System. The concrete implementation of AGATE is built on the Academy TYPO3 Extension, a framework for research portals built by the Digital Academy in combination with the Cultural Heritage Framework, another suite of TYPO3 extensions by the Digital Academy. All software for AGATE is Open Source and freely available on GitHub.