Authority Lookup Support Plan for Sinopia

About authority lookups in Sinopia

In Sinopia, a template can be configured to allow a cataloger to search a vocabulary of authoritative terms, and select a term from that vocabulary to fill in a field (or to be the object of an RDF statement). (This is done by creating a field of type "lookup".)

Sinopia makes these lookups possible either by using the Questioning Authority service, or by directly interacting with a vocabulary source.

Which lookups are available in Sinopia?

For a full list of lookups available in Sinopia, see this list of lookup configurations used by Sinopia; or create a new template in Sinopia (or look at an existing template), and find the Lookup attributes section, where you'll see a list of all available lookups in the Authorities dropdown; or see the QA service's list of authorities.

Requesting a new lookup and reporting and troubleshooting existing lookups

In the instructions that follow, you are directed to make issues and report requests in the QA github repository, even though some Sinopia lookups are provided by means other than QA. This is okay--your requests and problem reports will be addressed by the appropriate QA or Sinopia party.

Requesting a new lookup source

If there's a source you want to use for lookups and it's not already in Sinopia, follow these steps.

1. Check this QA project board to see if someone else has already requested the source. If so, add a comment to the existing issue to let the Sinopia and QA teams know that you also want this source.
2. If the new source hasn't been requested yet, use this Request a New Dataset template to open a new request. The request template will ask for basic information, and direct you to a spreadsheet where you can specify indexing requirements. You'll also have the option to add accuracy test parameters.

Problems with existing lookups?

If you encounter a problem with a lookup in Sinopia, such as unexpected results when you try to look up something in an authority, use this Indexing Bug template to create a new issue.

Doing your own QA troubleshooting

If you want to do some troubleshooting yourself before reporting an issue, here are a couple useful links:

• Check the status of QA lookups to see if a lookup source is responding or not.
• Try querying the source via QA directly (i.e., outside of Sinopia). From this Authority List page, find the authority in question, copy the Sample URL for a search, replace the search term with your own term, paste the URL into a browser and look at the results.
• To query the QA Server directly with SPARQL, from the QA triple store page choose your source, and click Query.

More about QA

QA supports lookups to additional authorities that aren't available in Sinopia. A full list of authorities, supported sub-authorities, and the URL for accessing them is at (https://lookup.ld4l.org/authority_list).

Additional use of QA in Sinopia

Plans for Sinopia include the ability to lookup an entity via QA, and then easily copy associated statements into a "form" in Sinopia to populate many of the fields. This feature is not yet available. One use case for this feature is the use of the Discogs authority to populate forms in Sinopia.