BIBFRAME for academic publishing in psychology

Tina Trillitzsch
ZPID (Leibniz Institute for Psychology), Germany

Abstract:
PSYNDEX of ZPID is a publically funded reference database for psychological research literature from German-speaking countries. We are currently rewriting our cataloging and indexing software and exposing all PSYNDEX publication data as linked open data, the resulting BIBFRAME-based knowledge graph serving as the basis for our new search portal PsychPorta. This case study discusses our rationales, modeling difficulties, and tools and strategies for migration and transformation.

Our cataloging software had accumulated many errors and problems over the years; we needed a modern, maintainable application. PubPsych, our search portal for researchers, teaching staff, practicing psychologists, and laypeople is also showing its age. To compete with commercial search engines, its successor PsychPorta needs to offer an improved, modern search experience while also providing persistent, open, interoperable, and reusable data.

PSYNDEX has high indexing standards: scientific publications are described with many details about the actual studies they document, using various keyword thesauri, classification systems, controlled vocabularies for research methods and study samples, metadata about preregistration, funding etc. BIBFRAME has little to offer for such details. To represent all this data and make it usable by humans and machines, other ontologies must be integrated, and new properties and classes have to be created. A new requirement was grouping “versions” of the same content in different publication forms – thus the adoption of BIBFRAME Works and Instances. Our experiences may be useful to other domains with indexing needs not covered by BIBFRAME, and also offer guidance on where BIBFRAME seems vague or unfinished. Our approach to handling e.g. dependent parts of things (journal articles, chapters) or aggregates and serials may be reused, thus improving interoperability.