The Nikita
-Noark 5 core project is implementing the Norwegian standard for
-keeping an electronic archive of government documents.
-The
-Noark 5 standard document the requirement for data systems used by
-the archives in the Norwegian government, and the Noark 5 web interface
-specification document a REST web service for storing, searching and
-retrieving documents and metadata in such archive. I've been involved
-in the project since a few weeks before Christmas, when the Norwegian
-Unix User Group
-announced
-it supported the project. I believe this is an important project,
-and hope it can make it possible for the government archives in the
-future to use free software to keep the archives we citizens depend
-on. But as I do not hold such archive myself, personally my first use
-case is to store and analyse public mail journal metadata published
-from the government. I find it useful to have a clear use case in
-mind when developing, to make sure the system scratches one of my
-itches.
-
-
If you would like to help make sure there is a free software
-alternatives for the archives, please join our IRC channel
-(#nikita on
-irc.freenode.net) and
-the
-project mailing list.
-
-
When I got involved, the web service could store metadata about
-documents. But a few weeks ago, a new milestone was reached when it
-became possible to store full text documents too. Yesterday, I
-completed an implementation of a command line tool
-archive-pdf to upload a PDF file to the archive using this
-API. The tool is very simple at the moment, and find existing
-fonds, series and
-files while asking the user to select which one to use if more than
-one exist. Once a file is identified, the PDF is associated with the
-file and uploaded, using the title extracted from the PDF itself. The
-process is fairly similar to visiting the archive, opening a cabinet,
-locating a file and storing a piece of paper in the archive. Here is
-a test run directly after populating the database with test data using
-our API tester:
-
-
-~/src//noark5-tester$ ./archive-pdf mangelmelding/mangler.pdf
-using arkiv: Title of the test fonds created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
-using arkivdel: Title of the test series created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
-
- 0 - Title of the test case file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
- 1 - Title of the test file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
-Select which mappe you want (or search term): 0
-Uploading mangelmelding/mangler.pdf
- PDF title: Mangler i spesifikasjonsdokumentet for NOARK 5 Tjenestegrensesnitt
- File 2017/1: Title of the test case file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
-~/src//noark5-tester$
-
-
-
You can see here how the fonds (arkiv) and serie (arkivdel) only had
-one option, while the user need to choose which file (mappe) to use
-among the two created by the API tester. The archive-pdf
-tool can be found in the git repository for the API tester.
-
-
In the project, I have been mostly working on
-the API
-tester so far, while getting to know the code base. The API
-tester currently use
-the HATEOAS links
-to traverse the entire exposed service API and verify that the exposed
-operations and objects match the specification, as well as trying to
-create objects holding metadata and uploading a simple XML file to
-store. The tester has proved very useful for finding flaws in our
-implementation, as well as flaws in the reference site and the
-specification.
-
-
The test document I uploaded is a summary of all the specification
-defects we have collected so far while implementing the web service.
-There are several unclear and conflicting parts of the specification,
-and we have
-started
-writing down the questions we get from implementing it. We use a
-format inspired by how The
-Austin Group collect defect reports for the POSIX standard with
-their
-instructions for the MANTIS defect tracker system, in lack of an official way to structure defect reports for Noark 5 (our first submitted defect report was a request for a procedure for submitting defect reports :).
-
-
The Nikita project is implemented using Java and Spring, and is
-fairly easy to get up and running using Docker containers for those
-that want to test the current code base. The API tester is
-implemented in Python.
-