Re: Request for feedback on BEACON specification

Hi Markus,

Markus Lanthaler wrote:

>> The BEACON link dump format has since been adopted widely in the
>> German GLAM sector: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BEACON
>> 
>> Like Linked Data Fragments, BEACON can be used to publish links
>> together with metadata with very limited technical requirements.
>> 
>> I am about to publish the BEACON specification as Internet Draft
>> and would welcome any feedback (e.g. at 
>> https://github.com/gbv/beaconspec/issues). BEACON link dumps can
>> be mapped to Linked Data Fragments and I use the Hydra Core
>> Vocabulary for mapping of BEACON link dumps to RDF:
>> 
>> http://gbv.github.io/beaconspec/beacon.html#rfc.section.5.1
> 
> I had a quick look at the spec. The mapping of #PREFIX etc. to the
> two triples in section 5.3 is not really clear to me and seems to
> contradict section 5.4 which says
> 
> The PREFIX meta field (Section 4.1.1) MAY be mapped to the RDF
> property void:uriSpace or void:uriRegexPattern with :sourceset as RDF
> subject.
 >
> Why is it a MAY in the sentence above? I'd go for a MUST but since I
> don't have much context I think it should at the very least be a
> SHOULD. That being said, PREFIX might not be the best name for this
> as it collides with Turtle's PREFIX which has different semantics
> [1]

Thanks for spotting this, I'll change to SHOULD. The name PREFIX is kept 
for backwards compatibility. BEACON link dump format is being used since 
2010 but mapping it to RDF has been added later.

> Btw. is there a demo available somewhere?

I'm still working on a reference implementation and just released the 
node module: https://www.npmjs.com/package/beacon-links including a 
command line client. To give a real world example, the city Archive 
Stuttgart provides a small BEACON file:

http://www.stadtarchiv-stuttgart.findbuch.net/beacon.txt

The ANNOTATION field is missing and TIMESTAMP is malformed but nevermind 
(that's why I finally want to finish the specification). If you add

#ANNOTATION: http://purl.org/dc/terms/extent

to the file, process it to RDF (meta fields not supported yet):

$ beaconlinks --format rdf beacon.txt

The link dump only contains three links with two RDF triples each and 
the following information:

- URI of a person, e.g <http://d-nb.info/gnd/12943499>

- URL of a link into the archive's catalog e.g
<http://www.stadtarchiv-stuttgart.findbuch.net/php/main.php?ar_id=3673&gnd=12943499>

- number of records for this person in the catalog, e.g 14


Using plain RDF technology would have been too much but creating a text 
based BEACON file has been doable also for small institutions.


Cheers
Jakob

-- 
Jakob Voß <jakob.voss@gbv.de>
Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG) / Common Library Network
Platz der Goettinger Sieben 1, 37073 Göttingen, Germany
+49 (0)551 39-10242, http://www.gbv.de/

Received on Thursday, 7 December 2017 14:16:43 UTC