sfomuseum-findingaids

Description

A Who's On First (sfomuseum-data) findinging aid is a lookup table mapping any given Who's On First (sfomuseum-data) ID to the (GitHub) repository where the full record for that ID is stored.

Reminder

This is not an ideal situation. It is a reflection of the fact that there is a still a limit to how many documents can be stored in a single Git(Hub) repository. While it may be true that SFO Museum doesn't have enough records, in total, to trigger that limit it is definitely true of Who's On First records so we (SFO Museum) simply follow the convention.

Data

Finding aid data is stored in the sfomuseum-data/sfomuseum-findingaids repository.

That data is updated using the bin/update-findingaids.sh tool which polls GitHub for sfomuseum-data- repositories that have been updated in the last (n) hours and then runs the wof-findingaid-populate tool (part of the whosonfirst/go-whosonfirst-findingaid repository) to index those repositories in both the [[findingaid]] DynamoDB table and corresponding CSV files in the sfomuseum-findingaids repository.

Model

The whosonfirst/go-whosonfirst-findingaid package defines three principal components for findingaids:

1. Providers. This is where data is read from, for example one or more sfomuseum-data- repositories.
2. Producers. This is what produces a findingaid lookup table.
3. Resolvers. This is what resolves an ID to a repository (using a lookup table to do so).

Readers

One of the principal uses for the findingaid is to use it in conjunction with the whosonfirst/go-reader-findingaid package. For example:

$> ./bin/read \
	-reader-uri 'findingaid://https/static.sfomuseum.org/findingaid/?template=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sfomuseum-data/{repo}/main/data/' \
	102527513 \

| jq '.["properties"]["wof:name"]'

"San Francisco International Airport"

In this example we are using a findingaid implementation of the whosonfirst/go-reader.Reader interface which takes as its constructor arguments:

1. The location of the findingaid resolver.
2. A URI template which the resultant repository will be applied producing a new go-reader.Reader constructor URI that will be used to produce a final reader implementation to "read" the input value (102527513).

It's all a bit "squirrel-y" but it works.

See also

• https://github.com/whosonfirst/go-reader-findingaid