General Question on Database Philosophy

Omeka S Development
#1

Hi, looking for general insight into philosophy of OmekaS and external data. We are looking at OmekaS for managing external websites (exhibits essentially) and as an OAI-PMH repository but not using it as our main collection management tool.

After installation and getting a feel for it, and then doing google searches and reading the forums I get the sense that OmekaS is not designed to work with external data other than through the Data Repository, DSpace, Fedora (maybe others?) repository plugins. I found a Geometry datatype plugin that references Postgresql (GitHub - Daniel-KM/Omeka-S-module-DataTypeGeometry: Module for Omeka S that adds data types "geometry" and "geography" to store markers and area highlights on images and maps with wkt) but it looks like it is not actively developed? I see the plugins for data importing from CSV and Zotero.

It seems that I cannot reference an external database and its tables (example: postgresql/postgis used with a collection management system). Could this conceivably be done with in house development? Or does that somehow go against the model of OmekaS? Would having a different collection management tool require exporting from that tool and importing to OmekaS in order to use items from our collection?

Thanks for the insight.

#2

There’s nothing that would prevent you from connecting to another database, but yes, it’s not the focus for Omeka S. Omeka S is built more for referencing external content and data than classic, but through using web APIs, URLs, iframes, things like that mostly, rather than a direct database connection to an external system.

Probably anything like that would be an area where it would be custom development. Even then, if your goal is really just to only connect over to another content management system (so you don’t want items, media, etc. created in Omeka’s database at all) then it’s probably not a good fit.

1 Like
#3

Thank you. I have been learning more about how Omeka S works, studying the database, and believe we can make this work by doing imports into Omeka S (so not doing data entry there, but only developing and managing sites).