DatAMazeD

The Dataflow Inventory project at the Library of the University of Amsterdam describes the existing information infrastructure and data architecture that serves as the switchboard between the library’s collection management on one side and discovery and delivery services for end users on the other side. This intermediate (meta)data management hub resembles a maze of silos, where data entry, ETL procedures and function calls reside. It consists of a large number of internal and external systems, datastores, data formats and data flows, that are all used to describe a large number of content types.

The objective of the project is to identify and reveal data flows, provenance, redundancies, selection, manipulation and dependencies, and to provide a starting point for efficiency improvements and subsequent innovation in end user services.

The background, approach, methodology (DFD) and modeling tool (Visual Paradigm) will be presented, as well as the resulting data flow model and (meta)data registry, a data redundancy typology and a number of diagrams, analyses, use cases and examples.

Presentation given at ELAG 2015, Stockholm