Introduction

DSpace users have expressed the need for DSpace to be able to provide more support for different types of digital objects related to open access publications, such as authors/author profiles, data sets etc. Configurable Entities are designed to meet that need.

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The Entity model also has similarities with the Portland Common Data Model (PCDM), with an Entity roughly mapping to a "pcdm:Object" and existing Communities and Collections roughly mapping to a "pcdm:Collection".  However, at this time DSpace Entities concentrate more on building a graph structure of relationships, instead of a tree structure.  

Default Entity Models

DSpace currently comes with the following Entity models

Research Entities

Research Entities include Person, OrgUnit, Project and Publication. They allow you to create author profiles (Person) in DSpace, and relate those people to their department(s) (OrgUnit), grant project(s) (Project) and works (Publication).

• Each publication can link to projects, people and org units
• Each person can link to projects, publications and org units
• Each project can link to publications, people and org units
• Each org units can link to projects, people and publications

Journals

Journal Entities include Journal, Journal Volume, Journal Issue and Publication (article).  They allow you to represent a Journal hierarchy more easily within DSpace, starting at the overall Journal, consisting of multiple Volumes, and each Volume containing multiple Issues.  Issues then link to all articles (Publication) which were a part of that journal issue. 

NOTE: that this model includes the same "Publication" entity as the Research Entities model described above.  This Entity overlap allows you to link an article (Publication) both to its author (Person) as well as the Journal Issue it appeared in.

Configuration of Entity types and their relations

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