Digital Publication

Publishing from OCHRE

Any item or collection of items can be published from OCHRE in a simplified XML format. These published items are made available via an API, allowing web developers to create websites that include project data.

Data can be published as individual items, as a hierarchical tree, or in sets. In the OCHRE application, a Set is a collection of items for editing, viewing, exporting, or publishing. On a practical level, a Set allows the user to view items from disparate contexts in a tabular format. For example, you may wish to publish a collection of pottery, texts, dictionary lemmas, etc. These items may all come from different hierarchical contexts, but can be collected into a single Set. Also, you can think of a Set as a mechanism for producing ad-hoc joins in your data. For example, you may create a Set of Texts, then ask the Set to retrieve properties from the objects that are linked to these Texts. See Customize Set Columns for more details.

Publishing as a Set allows you to publish the entire collection with a single click. For security reasons, only project administrators can publish data from their project.

An Overview of the Publication Process

The goal of the data publication process is to provide a range of customization to the researcher. There are options for researchers who do not wish to interact with HTML at all. At the other end of the spectrum, each step below can be customized as needed by experienced web developers. Any standard web publication tools can leverage data from the OCHRE API to create a public-facing frontend site.

In general, the publication process described below leverages OCHRE's item-based approach to data. Items can be organized into a variety of publication collections, or even published as individual items. Practically speaking, this means that you can publish items as tabular appendices, as navigable hierarchies, as maps, as image galleries, etc. Also, this means that as soon as items are entered in the database they can be published. The time between data capture and data publication is literally only the amount of time it takes to place the item in the correct context (hierarchy or set) and click the Publish button.

Curation

The publication process begins with project data. There is no need to export data to some type of middle-ware web server application that keeps a snapshot of data. The data that you edit and view in OCHRE is the same data that you publish to the world. As corrections and changes are made to the data in OCHRE, you can choose to republish it to update the publicly available data. You decide what gets published and when.

Organization

Experienced OCHRE users are familiar already with the various modes of organizing data in the OCHRE application. Many of these same organizational structures, like hierarchies and sets, simply can be published to serve as the frontend navigation mechanisms. However, in other cases it may make sense to collect items into set publication collections to make the public navigation simpler. For example, an archaeology project may choose to organize an excavation by site grid, square, locus, etc. While this same organization can serve as one possible navigational interface for the public website, it may also make sense to organize small finds into Sets to publish as discrete collections based on some similar feature such as material, inscription, object type, etc. Any item can be contextualized into any number of appendices.

Publication

With data editing in the OCHRE application and organized into the desired publication formats, it is literally a simple click of a Publish button that makes the item or collection of items available through the OCHRE API. See Publishing Items for some of the currently available options for publication.

With a single click, you can view your OCHRE data in a web browser. Each published item or collection of items has a persistent web address, a Citation URL, supported by the Digital Library Development Center at the University of Chicago. Simply copy/paste that URL in your browser to view your data.

When one of these links is loaded in a web browser, the default formats and styles created by the OCHRE Data Service (ODS) are triggered to present the data. You, as the researcher, do not need to write any HTML or JavaScript to view and share your data.

Customization

However, the ODS defaults are not the only way your data can be viewed online. The data is published in a standard and predictable XML format, making it accessible and customizable with standard web publication tools. Typically, this may mean that you or your web developer may choose to access a subset of your data using methods like XHR or fetch, then manipulate the data for display in customized formats.