General Content Models

TL:DR Complete Drupal integration, and look at all the different use cases!

1. Islandora 8 is a “complete integration between Drupal resources and a datastore, to manage RDF conversion and asset storage” (Summary, n.d.). Islandora 8 can be configured to use a variety of datastores but it defaults to Duraspace’s Fedora 5.x Repository. Islandora 8.x-1.x makes use of the Portland Common Data Model (PCDM) as a layer of abstraction over LDPCs to make containment simpler to understand for users; a pcdm:Collection may contain other pcdm:Collections or pcdm:Objects (similar to an Islandora 7.x-1.x collection content model), and a pcdm:Object may contain other pcdm:Objects (similar to the way an Islandora 7.x-1.x compound object has child objects) or pcdm:Files (similar to the way Islandora 7.x-1.x objects have datastreams). (What’s the difference between Islandora 1.x and Islandora 8.x., n.d.). (See Figure 1 below.) See PCDM for more information.

2. Islandora uses Blazegraph for querying its triple store. “Blazegraph DB is an ultra high-performance graph database supporting Blueprints and RDF/SPARQL APIs. It supports up to 50 Billion edges on a single node.” (Blazegraph, n.d.). “This replaces Mulgara. Formerly known as BigData. The intended use is solely for maintaining performant support of large Fedora repositories containing millions of objects.” (Replacing Mulgara with Blazegraph for High-Performance Low-Level Storage, n.d.). [summarized link]

Islandora 8 supports nearly limitless use cases because of how the system is integrated to allow Drupal contributed modules to treat Fedora assets just like Drupal assets. The following are examples of use cases available in Islandora 8 and currently in varying stages of development. As they are active cases, most are not yet completely documented:

• Collections
• Images (Large sized TIff/JP2 & typical size JPG/GIF/BMP)
• Paged content (Paged Content, n.d.)
  • Books (Paged Content, n.d.)
  • Scrapbooks (mixed content books)
  • Periodicals
  • Newspapers
  • Serials
  • Photographs (with a front & back), like postcards
  • Compound
  • Etc.
• Video, Audio, and Oral History
• PDFs
• Binary files
• Exhibits [personally involved in the generation of this] (Jordan, Keiser-Clark, Richards, van Schaik, Stanley, & Tillay, 2019)
• Scholarly
  • Journal article
  • Presentation
  • Poster
  • Research data (1 set)
  • Data Sets (2 or more sets)
    • An example of a Drupal module for datasets can be seen here: https://demo.getdkan.com/dataset/cedcd327-4e5d-43f9-8eb1-c11850fa7c55 (DKAN, n.d.)]
  • Modeling GIS Data (Mairo, 2019)
  • Electronic Theses & Dissertations (ETDs)
  • Bibliography & Citations (ADCI Solutions, 2017)
  • Orcid (Shen, 2017)
  • IRUS Counts (scholarly statistics)
  • Utilization of Ontologies (BIBO, COAR, and SPAR) (Lamb, 2017). Currently conceptual, so it’s not certain how complex it is.
• Accessing Islandora with Amazon Alexa (Anez, 2019)
• Islandora Research Management Platform (O’Neill & Stanley, 2020)