BHL and its developers: Wolfgang Koller

Today we talk to Wolfgang Koller, based at the Natural History Museum in Vienna.

What is it that you do for BHL-Europe?

I'm an IT-specialist at the Natural History Museum in Vienna, and I've been in the tech-group since I joined the project in September 2009. I mainly developed modules for the portal and coordinated development of the Pre-ingest-tool. In addition I helped take care of the schema-mapping tool and the OLEF-schema.

Can you explain what the pre-ingest is exactly?

The pre-ingest-tool harmonizes the content for our archive. It converts all different metadata and file formats from our contact providers into our format which we use in the archive. 

Also important is that it enhances the content/metadata by using external web services, e.g. name searching.

Tell me about the schema-mapping tool.

We used this tool to map the different metadata formats into OLEF (open literature exchange format), our internal format for saving metadata. It was definitely a challenge to support all different formats; they include modern formats like .xml but also older binary formats like marc21. Our intention was to create a tool which is easy to use for the content provider directly. And I like to think this went quite well.

What was the favourite beer you tasted during the project?

It most probably was Kilkenny from England, which I tried in London.

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