Overview

In order to facilitate the integration of data between OpenEdition Books, OpenEdition Journals, knowledge bases and discovery tools, KBART metadata (Knowledge Base And Related Tools) is now available for download on OpenEdition and BACON, the French national knowledge base (BAse de COnnaissance Nationale Française). Such data provides information relating to the status of the collections and the bundles available for purchase.

KBART files are published on BACON under the CC0 license and on OpenEdition under the following licenses: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License and the French “Licence Ouverte / Open license”.

Knowledge Base And Related Tools

In an era of electronic documentation, we are facing the challenge of ever-evolving catalogues and moving resources. In order to tackle this issue, the US agency for normalisation proposed KBART as a framework for sharing information about electronic collections.

The KBART recommandation mostly consists of a standard 25 columns TSV table and best practices about how to fill it, name it and share it. KBART files are very well suited to describe electronic collections such as OpenEdition’s. For each available resource, it allows one to get minimal bibliographic information along with access modalities (is this journal Open Access? what is the URL for that book?)

Yet, the KBART format is not adapted to retrieve detailed metadata about a resource. It is made to describe catalogues, bundles and states of collections. In case you’re looking for detailed metadata about OpenEdition resources, you should consider reading OpenEdition’s OAI-PMH or MARC documentations. In this case, KBART could be useful as en entry point in order to retrieve identifiers, for example. Such case is developed in the “Going further…” section of this documentation.

A standard format such as KBART facilitates interoperability, electronic resources maintenance and subscription management. It allows one to develop or use tools that are not provider-dependant.

BACON

BACON (BAse de COnnaissance Nationale) is a platform created and maintained by the ABES (Agence Bibliographique pour l’Enseignement Supérieur) in order to provide a Knowledge Base hub, centralizing KBART storage & access from many providers relevant for Superior Education & Research.

BACON provides free metadata (everything is CC0-licensed) for signaling electronic resources. It offers various services related to knwoledge bases.

A National Knowledge Base

At the end of March 2020, BACON gathers data from 106 providers, making more than 850 packages available from https://bacon.abes.fr

This website offers three main functionnalities : exporting data, signaling mistakes & syndication feeds. It comes with a documentation available in English, and a useful glossary, yet only in French. (alternatively, one can consult the NISO Kbart glossary)

This documentation also describes a few webservices, which allow one to build complex tools over BACON. These webservices expose KBART, XML or JSON and offer various functionnalities, such as retrieving a structured list of available packages.

The BACON documentation being quite extensive, we won’t be detailing here how to use BACON website & webservices.

Standard name scheme & unique endpoint

BACON-hosted KBART files follow the KBART recommandation for file naming: [ProviderName]_[Region/Consortium]_[PackageName]_[YYYY-MM-DD].txt

Knowing a KBART file name, it is possible to access it at: https://bacon.abes.fr/package2kbart/[Filename]

Versionning

As the name scheme above suggests, BACON makes it possible to get the version of a KBART file at a given date by specifying it in the last part of the file name, in YYYY-MM-DD format.

If that part is omitted, so the filename looks like [ProviderName]_[Region/Consortium]_[PackageName].txt, BACON will automatically serve the most up-to-date version.

It is also possible to graphically browse a file’s versions in the website interface:

Data curation & quality label

BACON’s data is monitored and curated by the ABES teams. When a KBART file meets certain quality criterias, it is given a “quality label”. As it can be seen in the above screenshot, the OpenEdition Hypotheses KBART has been highlighted by this label.

Warning

KBART files served by BACON are appended a non-standard 26th column, called bestppn. It is the best matching identifier found for this resource in the SUDOC catalogue. Additional information about this 26th column can be found in this article from the ABES’s blog (in French).

Most of the time, it can simply be ignored if it’s not of any use to you.