Valeros

Warning

This project is actively being developed, but not yet ready for production. For the latest development version, please check the RAZU fork.

Valeros allows easy setup of a faceted search Linked Open Data viewer, working across ontologies and organizations out-of-the-box. It is designed to be flexible and configurable, allowing you to tweak how, where, and when to show data to your end users. As a front-end/client-side viewer, it is simple and cheap to host and deploy. As a back-end, it uses Elasticsearch for efficient search and filtering, and (optionally) SPARQL for asynchronous enrichment of search results.

For technical documentation, please check the project wiki.

This project is a collaboration between Het Utrechts Archief, Regionaal Archief Zuid-Utrecht and Kasteel Amerongen, developed by Simon Dirks. If you have any questions or comments about the project, please reach out to mail@simondirks.com.

Why use Valeros?

We believe that end users should not have to deal with the complexities of Linked Data. Because of this, Valeros is designed to hide the complexities of Linked Data from users. We have focused our efforts on making it easy to combine data from different organizations and ontologies in one place, but Valeros also works well with single datasets and ontologies.

Most Linked Data viewers are data-agnostic, meaning that they generally treat all (meta)data equally and visualize it in a single, unified manner. For the end user, however, some information might be more interesting to see than others, and you may find that different types of data require distinct visualization methods.

Valeros allows you to easily configure:

1. What data to show to the end user (e.g. hiding all mdto:checksum fields for a node, or hiding all skos:Concept nodes from the search hits).
2. Where/when to show data to the end user (e.g. always show a field on the search hits page, or only on the details page?).
3. How to display data for the end user, rendering different data in different ways (e.g. use a built-in image component for all foaf:depiction fields, a map component for sdo:contentLocation fields, or create a custom component for rendering your ontology-specific predicates).

Projects using Valeros

Kasteel Amerongen pilot project

Valeros was initially developed as a Kasteel Amerongen pilot project, using Linked Open Data standards to bring together data of Het Utrechts Archief, Regionaal Archief Zuid-Utrecht and Kasteel Amerongen in a single search interface.

You can try the prototoype at lodpilot.kasteelamerongen.nl.

For additional context, consider checking out the NDE podcast on the project.

RAZU viewer

The Regionaal Archief Zuid-Utrecht fork is being actively developed, and extends the pilot project's functionality with various features such as:

1. A built-in PDF viewer (PDF.js).
2. IIIF viewer (Mirador).
3. On-the-fly Office (doc, ppt, xls, etc) document to PDF conversion (Gotenberg).
4. Token generation (SURA).

If of general (non-RAZU-specific) use, these features will be merged into this main repository in the near future.

Dev

This project was generated with Angular CLI version 17.0.1, and uses Tailwind CSS for styling.

Run ng serve for a dev server. Run ng build to build the project.

If you run into node version issues, consider using something like nvm (e.g., nvm use 18).