Technical Details

Contents

1. Technical Overview

2. Raw Data Creation Specifications

3. The SCTA RDF Schema and RDF Aggregation

4. APIs

5. Implementations

1. Technical Overview

The SCTA system (or better SCTA ecosystem) is designed to break apart and modularize the independent and re-usable features of a traditional webstack. By separating the monolithic stack into independent pieces, we can reduce the need to needless recreate data, code libraries, or front-end clients. These pieces can be re-used, mixed, combined, and separated. This means by creating data and allowing it to be aggregated by the SCTA you are never siloing your data into one system, and you always remain free to continue doing whatever you like with that data. But it also means if data has already been created you don't need to re-create it. More importantly, because data is separated from any one particular technology stack, it can combined with other pieces of distributed data, allowing us to create a network of information that spans the entire corpus, again, all while refusing to silo any piece of data in any particular system.

This separation of concerns also helps to reduce the load of a traditional software stack. Instead of everyone having to create a new web stack to create a basic website to display data of interest, they can leverage professional grade code and software that have already been built and are maintained by the community. Likewise, code contributions or improvements that any one project makes to this open source software becomes an improvement that every project can make use of it.

The central separation of concerns that lies at the heart of the SCTA is visualized below:

The various pieces of this visualization and the technical specifications that govern them are defined more precisely below:

2. Raw Data Creation Specifications

Data aggregation into a connected graph requires structured data.

Below are the data specification created by or adopted by the SCTA community

Expression Description Files (EDFs) | https://github.com/scta/edf-schema

Text Edition Schema: LombardPress-Schema | https://github.com/lombardpress/lombardpress-schema

Transcriptions Description File (TDFs) | https://github.com/scta/tdf-schema

People Description Files | In Development

Codex Description Files | In Development

3. The SCTA RDF Schema and RDF Aggregation

Aggregation of raw data requires a output specification for the resulting graph.

This specification is the SCTA RDF Schema | https://github.com/scta/scta-rdf-schema/

Using the raw data structured according to the above specifications an aggregator can combine that information to build a connected graph structure according to the SCTA-RDF Schema

The SCTA-RDF Aggregation Application | https://github.com/scta/scta-rdf is one such application.

4. APIs

Using the connected graph built by the SCTA Aggregation Application, API's can be built to facilitate the access and use of the SCTA graph

  	    
$ curl -iH "Accept: text/plain" http://scta.info/resource/lectio1
$ curl -iH "Accept: text/turtle" http://scta.info/resource/lectio1
$ curl -iH "Accept: application/rdf+xml" http://scta.info/resource/lectio1
$ curl -iH "Accept: application/json" http://scta.info/resource/lectio1
$ curl -iH "Accept: application/trix" http://scta.info/resource/lectio1
$ curl -iH "Accept: */*" http://scta.info/resource/lectio1