The HydraConnect 2015 conference took place September 21-25 in Minneapolis[1] totaling 200 people from 60 institutions including 2 representatives from Yale, Kalee Sprague and Eric James. The conference was structured with Monday Workshops, a Tuesday morning plenary, a Tuesday afternoon poster session, and sessions, lighting talks, and breakout groups on Thursday and Friday. The project “Hydra” has come to represent an aggregation of components serving the needs of the digital community. Core applications include Blacklight[2] – a discovery index and interface, Sufia[3] – an institutional repository supporting self-upload, Avalon[4] – an application for audio/video materials, Spotlight[5] – an exhibit creation tool, Stanford Earthworks[6] – supporting spatial discovery, and Hydra in a Box[7] – a new project to create a turnkey Hydra application. The main themes of the conference were linked data and interoperability, the approach of defining a content model by fleshing out metadata concerns driven by end user requirements. To this end several initiatives are currently under development centered around The Portland Common Data Model PCDM[8], a construct built on the resource/description/containment spec of the Linked Data Platform[9], providing a generic framework for resource properties and association. A key component of this is the championing of the approach of using dereferenceable URIs[10] in metadata description and tackling the challenges this entails such as enriching current literal description, resolving URIs to its constituent properties, caching fragments of this linked data, and achieving all of this in a platform agnostic way. Complementing this work are several interest and working groups, addressing the specific areas such descriptive/rights/structural metadata, service management, UX design, and archival interests. HydraConnect 2015 is the third conference of its kind and has grown considerably each year with expectations of much development to continue.
[1]https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/hydra/Hydra+Connect+2015
[2] http://projectblacklight.org/
[3] https://github.com/projecthydra/sufia
[4] http://www.avalonmediasystem.org/resources
[5] https://library.stanford.edu/projects/spotlight
[6]http://library.stanford.edu/blogs/digital-library-blog/2015/04/introducing-earthworks-stanfords-new-gis-data-discovery
[7] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/hydra/Hydra+in+a+Box
[8] https://github.com/duraspace/pcdm/wiki
[9] http://www.w3.org/TR/ldp/
[10]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dereferenceable_Uniform_Resource_Identifier
