invenio-subjects-fast 2023.7.5

Provides the FAST faceted subject vocabulary for InvenioRDM

invenio-subjects-fast

FAST subject vocabulary for the InvenioRDM repository system.

Install this extension to use the FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology) subject vocabulary in your InvenioRDM instance. FAST is developed by OCLC Research (https://www.oclc.org/research/areas/data-science/fast.html) and adapts the Library of Congress Subject Headings to use a faceted structure, allowing flexible and efficient tagging and searching. FAST is made available under the Open Data Commons Attribution License (https://www.oclc.org/research/areas/data-science/fast/odcby.html).

Some of the facets in FAST are extremely large. (Well over a million terms.) So this package provides the nine facets of the FAST vocabulary in Invenio as nine separate subject vocabularies. Each term's id is the full URL for the term (e.g., http://id.worldcat.org/fast/1204165).

The invenio-subjects-fast package comes with a preconfigured set of jsonl files ready to be loaded as fixtures into InvenioRDM. It also includes scripts to download the raw .marcxml files from the FAST project and convert them into jsonl vocabulary files. This download and conversion process will only be necessary, though, when the FAST terms are updated.

Installation

From your InvenioRDM instance directory:

pipenv install invenio-subjects-fast

This will add the package to your Pipfile and install it in your InvenioRDM instance's virtual environment.

Usage

The package will automatically provide the entry points for InvenioRDM to register the vocabulary as a subject scheme. If you are installing the vocabulary in an existing InvenioRDM instance, though, you will have to tell Invenio to create vocabulary fixtures from the package files:

pipenv run invenio rdm-records fixtures

Note that this fixture creation will take quite a few minutes, and on lower-powered processors may take more than half an hour. During this time the terminal process will simply read "Creating required fixtures..." This should eventually be followed by "Created required fixtures!" But the initial loading process for such a large set of vocabulary files is very slow.

The vocabulary terms will not be available for some time even after the fixtures have been created and you receive the "Created required fixtures!" message. This is because the indexing of each vocabulary term is delegated to a RabbitMQ task to be performed in due course by a celery worker. It may take as long as several hours for celery to complete all of these queued tasks. Once the queue has completed, though, the FAST terms will appear as suggestions in the subject field of the deposit form.

Vocabulary file format

The official InvenioRDM documentation recommends yaml files for custom vocabularies. This file format is quite slow, though, for InvenioRDM to ingest. So this module instead provides jsonl formatted files.

Updating the vocabulary

The invenio-subjects-fast package includes a preconfigured set of Invenio vocabulary files in jsonl format. You can, however, download and compile updated FAST source files for yourself. First, from your Invenio instance directory, run

pipenv run invenio-subjects-fast download

This will download the nine separate vocabulary facets from the FAST project's download page as marcxml files (https://www.oclc.org/research/areas/data-science/fast/download.html).

To convert these to Invenio's subject jsonl format, run

pipenv run invenio-subjects-fast convert

Issues with loading updated vocabularies into InvenioRDM

Note that at the time of writing, InvenioRDM has no capacity to update installed fixtures without either recreating the database with invenio-cli services setup --force or manually updating the database. It is hoped that this situation will be fixed before the next update is made to this package. Be aware, though, that once installed this vocabulary cannot easily be updated at the moment.

Updating this package

The FAST vocabulary is updated every 6 months. When a new version of the FAST terms is released, this package should be updated. You can tell that an update may be necessary if the current version of the FAST vocabulary was released after the date used as the version number for this package.

If you would like to contribute an updated version, first create a fork of the (https://github.com/MESH-Research/invenio-subjects-fast), clone it locally, and install the local version of the package in development mode. Then from the folder where the invenio-subjects-fast package was installed, run

pipenv run invenio-subjects-fast download

followed by

pipenv run invenio-subjects-fast convert

Run the automated tests with the test-runner script:

bash run-tests.sh

Once the tests pass, bump the version number in invenio_subjects_mesh/__init__.py and in pyproject.toml to the current date (YYYY-MM-DD) and submit a pull request to the main invenio-subjects-fast repository.

Versions

This repository follows calendar versioning:

2021.06.18 is both a valid semantic version and an indicator of the year-month corresponding to the loaded FAST terms.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Guillaume Viger and Northwestern University for the invenio-subjects-mesh package which provided the framework for this package and parts of this README text.