SkoHub: KOS-based content syndication with ActivityPub
Channel: SWIB
Date: 2019-12-02

Talk by Adrian Pohl / Felix Ostrowski
hbz, Germany / graphthinking GmbH

Abstract:
For a long time, openness movements and initiatives with labels like “Open Access”, “Open Educational Resources” (OER) or “Linked Science” have been working on establishing a culture where scientific or educational resources are by default published with an open license on the web to be read, used, remixed and shared by anybody. With a growing supply of resources on the web, the challenge grows to learn about or find resources relevant for teaching, studies, or research.
Current approaches provided by libraries for publishing and finding open content on the web are often focused on repositories as the place to publish content. Those repositories provide (ideally standardized) interfaces for crawlers to collect and index the metadata in order to offer search solutions on top. Besides being error-prone and requiring resources for keeping up with changes in the repositories, this approach also does not take into account how web standards work. In short, the repository metaphor guiding this practice obscures what constitutes the web: resources that are identified by HTTP URIs.
In this presentation, we describe the SkoHub project being carried out in 2019 by the hbz in cooperation with graphthinking GmbH. The project seeks to implement a prototype for a novel approach in syndicating content on the web. In order to do so, we make use of the decentralized social web protocol ActivityPub to build an infrastructure where services can send and subscribe to notifications for subjects defined in knowledge organization systems (KOS, sometimes also called “controlled vocabularies”). While the repository-centric approach favours content deposited in a repository that provides interfaces for harvesting, with SkoHub any web resource can make use of the notification mechanism.

SWIB19 Conference, 25-27 November 2019, Hamburg, Germany
http://swib.org/swib19/
#swib19
Licence: CC-BY-SA
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/