Authority lists
Authority files are xml documents that we use to keep separate lists of controlled vocabularies, ontologies, etc. They serve us as a reference where we can give unique ids to various frequently mentioned items such as materials, repositories, divine beings. We can provide extra information for these items in the authority lists that does not otherwise fit in the EpiDoc xml files, such as translations in different languages or synonyms, for example. Keeping this information stored elsewhere saves a lot of time and effort in encoding the EpiDoc files, as we could simply reference the unique id, and it is consistent with the principle of not repeating oneself. Exporting the information contained in the authority files into RDF helps the exchange of data between different projects using their own vocabulary as RDF is not language dependent.
The authority files live in webapps/ROOT/content/xml/authority, which as of the moment of installation contains 11 example files taken from the IOSPE project. We can fill these files with data from our own project, or use them as templates to create new files for any categories we want to have a reference with. The authority itself has TEI markup. The supported markup is:
- tei:person, tei:person/tei:persName
- tei:place, tei:place/tei:placeName
- tei:item, tei:item/tei:gloss, tei:item/tei:term
- tei:org, tei:org/tei:orgName
- tei:idno
If you want to use different markup you can do so by defining its transformation into RDF in webapps/ROOT/stylesheets/rdf/**authority-to-rdf.xsl**.
In the beginning of your customization of EFES, it is useful to set up an RDF repository where you can store the RDF extracted from your data. This allows for the information to be queried easily when it has been made use of in various context - e.g. in facets and indices. The types of markup that has been discussed in the previous section are already supported with an xslt that is found in webapps/ROOT/stylesheets/rdf/authority-to-rdf.xsl. In this file you can add your own custom rdf harvesting templates if you want to use any other markup. This is harvested in the Admin page through the "Harvest All" button or individually for every authority file with the "harvest" link next to it. Every time that an authority list is edited, it is necessary to re-harvest and re-index all files.
When an authority term is used in a facet, we don't store the authority term itself, but rather the reference to it which is a url. In order to display the term from the authority file in the search results, we need to make solr look it up in the RDF harvested from the file. This is done by adding the name of the solr field in which the facet values are stored to the list in the variable <rdf-facet-lookup-fields> in webapps/ROOT/sitemaps/**config.xmap**.
When an authority term is used as an index item name the display will automatically look up in the rdf to get the term. If the term does not exist in the rdf, i.e. has not been harvested, the reference will be displayed:
If you are getting this result, you might want to reharvest your files or check that your markup is correctly referencing the authority file.