We had the chance to present “Pubby”, our Front end for RDF-Data at Mini-Elag. It was an online conference, due to the ongoing pandemic situation. There were eleven interesting lighting talks, each between 5-10 minutes long. Elag is known for their conferences on the application of information technology in libraries and documentation centres. They discuss new technologies, to review on-going developments and to exchange best practices. We want to highlight a few of the talks we found particularly interesting.
Matthew Phillips, from Durham University, United Kingdom, presented on the topic of how they enforced social distancing in their library. They had to restrict physical access to the library and limit the number of people using it at the same time. So they built a system to ensure fair access for academic staff and students.
Olli Lyytinen, from Durham University Library, United Kingdom, gave a talk on how they use the functional programming language Elm to simplify their request forms. Their goal was an interactive form which adapts itself to the user and their choices. This leads to an intuitive interface which hides options and fields irrelevant for the user automatically.
Lionel Walter, from Basel University Library, Switzerland, explained, how microservices work in an amusing way using Duplo. They also use it for a gateway to historical and modern collections of Swiss libraries and archives. They use Apache Kafka and Kubernetes for their infrastructure.
We presented “Pubby” our Front-end for RDF-Data. Following an explanation of the reasons for developing Pubby, we described our workflow for the ingestion and integration of data from several databases. We also showed a small example of the look and feel when using Pubby. If you are interested, the slides of our talk are at the end of this blog post. We also received some recommendations for alternative Front-ends like ResearcheGate.
We want to thank Peter van Boheemen and the Elag team for organising Mini-Elag, and we are looking forward to hopefully attending Elag in person next year 🙂
Elag-Pubby