CLARIN Virtual Collection Registry

Description

From the requirements description:

A virtual collection (VC) is a collection that is the result of browsing or searching repositories rather than being the result of construction and first-time publication by an organisation. Another characterisation is that the resources in a VC are already available in other collections, and the VC can be considered a derived collection. Nevertheless these VCs may need to be citable for future use and should therefore be able to be registered in a register, the VCR.

The Virtual Collection Registry (VCR) is an online registry that provides a REST service as well as a web based graphical user interface for the creation, publication, management and retrieval of virtual collections. Published collections are made available as CMDI records over OAI-PMH.

These components are available at the following locations (currently referencing the alpha deployment!):

• ​/vcr/app: GUI
• ​/vcr/service: REST service
• ​/vcr/oai: OAI-PMH endpoint

The help page​ explains the core concepts and terminology relevant to the VCR (based on the information gathered on this page).

REST service

The VCR REST service provides CRUD operations on a 'virtualcollection' resource. Its internal XML format for input and output is defined by an XML schema​. In addition, it supports JSON for input and output and CMDI and HTML output for individual collections (via content negotiation).

A full description of the service can be found in Protocol.txt​.

Form submission service

A special endpoint of the VCR REST service allows input from HMTL forms to create new virtual collections. This way, other web applications (such as the VLO) can prepare a collection based on resources gathered in their workflows, and allow the user to send them to the VCR with a single click while preserving the ability to authenticate via Shibboleth.

The submission endpoint is /vcr/service/submit. It accepts the following form parameters:

• type (required)
• name (required)
• metadataUri (list, required)
• resourceUri (list, required)
• description (required)
• keyword
• purpose
• reproducibility
• reproducibilityNotice
• creationDate
• queryDescription
• queryUri
• queryProfile
• queryValue

An example implementation (based on Wicket) can be found in the 'VirtualCollectionSubmissionPage' in the experimental branch of the VLO.

Technical notes

Development

Deployment

Tickets

Milestones:

• VirtualCollectionRegistry-1.0

Open tickets:

Ticket	Summary	Priority	Owner	Reporter
#654	Improve dealing with failed PID minting	critical	Willem Elbers	Twan Goosen
#601	Versioning of virtual collections	major		Twan Goosen
#611	prefill the mimetype for ResourceProxy	major		Dieter Van Uytvanck
#621	Custom user properties override SAML attributes	major		Twan Goosen
#622	More lightweight response at /service/virtualcollections	major		Twan Goosen
#748	Inject OAIProvider instance	major		Twan Goosen
#837	Automatically detect mimetype of references	major	Twan Goosen	Willem Elbers
#842	DataCite metadata store	major	Twan Goosen	Willem Elbers
#1014	Make button group with two choices more clear	major	Willem Elbers	Willem Elbers
#1017	Logout button	major	Willem Elbers	Willem Elbers
#603	Auto-recognize links in description field	minor		Twan Goosen
#605	Make it possible to re-use authors that have been entered before	minor		Twan Goosen
#612	add creator lookup based on ORCID	minor		Dieter Van Uytvanck
#626	Bootstrap styled pagination controls	minor		Twan Goosen
#871	Record page could be stateless	minor	Willem Elbers	Twan Goosen