Performing Entity Facts

Abstract

In a theatre play, persons appear as playwright, director, actors, etc. The play may have several performances with changing casts while actors may contribute to other plays and the role of a contributor may vary. Persons and the character of their contribution are a major focus in the performing arts domain. In order to create a domain specific and comprehensive research portal, current indexing techniques are combined with linked data methods giving access to person related information. The Specialised Information Service Performing Arts aggregates numerous metadata sources documenting the holdings of German-speaking cultural heritage institutions. This information source is extended by links to the recently established service Entity Facts by the German National Library that provides details to the persons related to the metadata records. The portal is based on the VuFind framework with index files that cover the metadata of all data providers and the cached data of all related authority records from Entity Facts. In order to achieve this, the standard model of VuFind MARC21 has been replaced by the Europeana model EDM. This allows for modeling all data – metadata and authority data – following linked data principles. While the respective mappings could be re-used new record drivers and indexing rules had to be defined.