DSpace-Dev @ University
of Minho
Development of tools and add-ons for the
DSpace platform
Miguel Ferreira
mferreira@dsi.uminho.pt
Ana Alice Baptista
analice@dsi.uminho.pt
7-8 July 2005
Papadocs
• The students repository
– http://papadocs.dsi.uminho.pt
• Contains reports, assignments,
learning materials, etc.
• Also served as a test bed for the
developed add-ons
Commentary Add-on
• Threaded forum associated with any
DSpace resource
– Web-page, community, collection, item or e-person
• Based on a graph instead of the most
commonly seen tree-like fora
– Users are allowed to comment one or more
resources with a single post
• Supports anonymous comments with or
without revision
• Includes a custom-tag that summarises
the most relevant comments in a
subsection of DSpace
Commentary Add-on
Controlled Vocabulary Add-on
• Taxonomy based controlled vocabulary
• Used to describe self-deposited items
(keywords)
• Simplifies and enhances searching
– Increased precision and recall
• Enables the generalisation of concepts
• Support for multiple taxonomies
• Easy to integrate new taxonomies
– Taxonomies described by independent XML files
• Can be enhanced to support more
complex structures such as thesauri
Controlled Vocabulary Add-on
Recommendation Add-on
• Gives suggestions of related
resources
– items, e-persons e comments
• requires extra information
– who downloaded what
– new table on the database
• Three distinct recommendation
algorithms
– Item-based Top-N Filter
– Social Information Filter (Word-of-Mouth)
– Web of Communication Filter
Recommendation Add-on
Web of Communication Add-on
• Exposes invisible relationships
between resources in a 3D
network
• Possibility of switching between
the text mode and the 3D
interface
• Requires a VRML plug-in to be
installed on the client’s browser
Teia de comunicação
A look into the Future
• Integration of add-ons with the
official DSpace source code (in
progress)
• Improve the Controlled
Vocabulary Add-on to support
thesauri
• Automatic metadata extraction
– Recommendation of description keywords
Questions?
• Project information at
http://dspace-dev.dsi.uminho.pt
• Add-ons with source-code
• Portuguese version of DSpace
Miguel Ferreira
mferreira@dsi.uminho.pt
Ana Alice Baptista
analice@dsi.uminho.pt