This repository serves as a store for the software development efforts around the SemCMD package for Arches.
SemCMD is a tool designed to support the information management process itself, especially in the context of data integration projects. In the contemporary information management environment, the sheer volume and diversity of data and software tools alongside the variety of new projects launched at any one moment makes the prospect of data integration at once ever more necessary and ever more daunting. This is the problem space in which SemCMD is designed to intercede.
SemCMD is, as it were, a database of databases. It provides a tool for tracking and managing data and software projects in both their technical and human contexts. This means providing a documentation framework for recording and tracking projects, services, datasets, software and the human agents and groups that manage and maintain them. The goal of such a database is to support information specialists focussing on long term data integration and management that spans across individual efforts and groups and over the long term.
SemCMD is designed for organizations such as research infrastructures, libaries and archives and other groups that have wide data management responsibilities who must therefore be supported with the ability to track the evolution of an information environment over time.
The data modelling design of this project has been founded on a reuse of
- the Parthenos Entities ontology (https://www.parthenos-project.eu, WP5)
alongside the implementation of
- the Project Layer Description Model (https://zellij.pythonanywhere.com/docs/list/app8rHfEiYQLOVrtc?flag=0)
The Parthenos Entities Model is a formal ontology that was developed for the Parthenos Project, a Horizon 2020 funded project that aimed to develop methods and techniques for the establishment and maintenance of research infrastructures.
The Project Lay Description Model is a co-development of Takin.solutions and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/). It operationalizes the formal ontology of the Parthenos Entities model into semantic reference data models which are devised to create a data management strategy for data integration process management. These models are platform agnostic and can be implemented in any semantic data management platform.
This repository is maintained by:
- Takin.solutions (https://takin.solutions)
As mentioned above the SemCMD package is developed for implementation in the Arches software. Arches is a semantic data management platform that allows the building of data models that are created using formal ontologies. This means data managed in these models is 'born semantic', ready for broader data integration with projects implementing the same or aligned formal ontology models.
Arches is developed by Farallon Geographics (https://www.fargeo.com/) and is supported by the Getty Conservation Institute (https://www.getty.edu/conservation/) and World Monuments Fund (https://www.wmf.org/).
At present the SemCMD Arches package is developed for version 6.1 of the Arches Semantic Data Platform tool (https://github.com/archesproject/arches/tree/stable/6.1.1). As further versions of the package are developed they will be added to this repository under a standardized version release process.
To learn more about Arches go here: https://www.archesproject.org/
To understand how to load this and other Arches packages, read the official documentation here: https://arches.readthedocs.io/en/stable/installing/projects-and-packages/
Institutions and groups interested in implementing SemCMD are welcome to download and install the software. For questions on its use please contact Takin.solutions at the address given above. To register issues with the package please use the issues managment service of this github repository.