Infrastructure
LINCS is building a national Linked Open Data store for the dissemination of the data it converts. One or more open-source triple-store systems will house large RDF datasets that will support billions of triples. The storage environment is being selected to ensure compatibility with participating datasets, integrating ontologies, tuning the inference functionality, and installing the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that will enable trusted data providers to push in data on a regular basis, and create hooks for Access tools.
LINCS infrastructure is hosted on the Compute Canada cloud. It contains platforms for high performance computing with Apache Spark, multiple web services deployed on Kubernetes, and data storage with an S3-compatible service. LINCS will also be consulting with national research data preservation initiatives regarding long-term data management. The project has established its code repository on GitLab with a continuous integration/continuous deployment pipeline.
The LINCS team is evaluating a number of major contenders for project platforms and will begin installation in late 2020.
The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) provides Canadian researchers with an accessible virtual research environment housing twenty-five projects and 250,000+ items, and it hosts, disseminates, and provides online tools for cultural research. Through LINCS and collaboratively with Bucknell University, CWRC will upgrade its Fedora platform and Islandora interface framework, and be equipped to push Linked Open Data into LINCS. CWRC will serve as an on-ramp for digital scholarship, and it will provide a testbed for studying Linked Open Data that is iterative, interactive, and dynamic—like the web—and thus poses challenges in frequent versioning of data. CWRC will model how other research environments can incorporate LINCS functionality.
LINCS relies on partners in the digital ecosystem for source data storage, management, and preservation. Source collections may be hosted in a range of ways to achieve stable URLs for LINCS metadata: through institutional repositories, stable research sites, or the Internet Archive.
