Combine 🚜¶
Overview¶
Combine is an application to facilitate the harvesting, transformation, analysis, and publishing of metadata records by Service Hubs for inclusion in the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).
The name “Combine”, pronounced /kämˌbīn/ with a long i, is a nod to the combine harvester used in farming used for, “combining three separate harvesting operations - reaping, threshing, and winnowing - into a single process” Instead of grains, we have metadata records! These metadata records may come in a variety of metadata formats, various states of transformation, and may or may not be valid in the context of a particular data model. Like the combine equipment used for farming, this application is designed to provide a single point of interaction for multiple steps along the way of harvesting, transforming, and analyzing metadata in preperation for inclusion in DPLA.
Installation¶
Combine has a fair amount of server components, dependencies, and configurations that must be in place to work, as it leverages Apache Spark, among other applications, for processing on the backend.
The current version of Combine uses Docker as the only means of deploying a server (starting with version v0.11). This combine-docker version can be found on the `MI-DPLA/combine-docker <https://github.com/MI-DPLA/combine-docker`_ github. Earlier versions of Combine used a separate GitHub repository, Combine-playbook to assist with provisioning a Combine server using Vagrant and/or Ansible.
Table of Contents¶
If you just want to kick the tires, the QuickStart guide provides a walkthrough of harvesting, transforming, and publishing some records, that lays the groundwork for more advanced analysis.