Title: PROVisualizer People!
Team: Charlie Farrugia, Asa Letourneau, Conal Tuohy
Short description:
This interactive data visualization of the Victorian State government archive is a handy tool to get a sense of the kinds of public records we hold. Search by keyword or by typical government function and then click through to series within the collection. This is the first and only visualisation of high level archival data in Australia and is going a long way to giving first time researchers a way of accessing 100 shelf kilometers of records with a google type keyword search filterable by date.
Long description:
This interactive data visualization of the Victorian State government archive, consisting of software licensed under an Apache Open Source Licence, and data licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution licence, is a handy tool to get a sense of the kinds of public records we hold. Search by keyword or by typical government function and then click through to series within the collection. PROVisualizer was developed by independent software developer and LODLAM evangelist Conal Tuohy, with project conception and management by Asa Letourneau from Public Record Office Victoria (the State Government Archives of Victoria, Australia)and initial data curation by Charlie Farrugia, Senior Collections Advisor also from PROV. The data that drives PROVisualizer is the entire archives metadata modelled as RDF. The basic workflow consists of a scheduled harvest of collection management data from an OAI repository, transforming the XML data into RDF using XSLT, storing the RDF in a triple-store, and querying it using SPARQL to create the visualisation. This is the first and only visualisation of high level archival data in Australia and is going a long way to giving first time researchers a way of accessing 100 shelf kilometers of records with a google type keyword search filterable by date. PROVisualizer was the first exploratory step in leveraging the power of RDF. Next steps will see PROV developing new LOD systems including a Secondary Asset Management System project that is going to use LOD to describe the publicly accessible content and related entities. PROVisualizer can be used and shared from prov.vic.gov.au/provisualizer