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In 2012 dodis collected over 10'000 links to other historical projects (f.e. HLS or FRUS), but most of them were not longer valid. We linked our persons to other persons in the internet. But the projects changed their domains, projects didn't have persistent links and things were messy in the database. The outgoing links also didn't increase the visibility of dodis. The project didn't link back to the source article in dodis. It was a unidirectional connection.
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Metagrid tries to solve this problem. A central hub should collect and manage links of the same person in different platforms. Metagrid provides an easy rest interface to get those links back. If a user add a connection between two projects the link is available to both projects. The link is bidirectional and increase the visibility of the participating projects.
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## Providers
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Providers are participating project in metagrid. There is a [list](https://source.dodis.ch/metagrid-go/metagrid-go/-/wikis/providers/1-Overview#available-providers) of all project participating in metagrid. A provider provides data to metagrid. This can be a public website (html), a public or private api or a public csv list. Providers also provides a sitemap of all person resources.
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## Metadata
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Metagrid collects not just the link, but also metadata about the person. We collect first_name, last_name, birth_date and death_date. We use those data to create the concordances on metagrid. We recommed to use [microdata](https://schema.org/Person) to tag your data in plain html pages.
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## Concordances
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Concordance describe a collections of links between different projects. A concordance is the product of intellectual work. Someone manually connected the same persons from different projects together. F.e. Albert Schweizer (Hls) <-> Albert Schweizer (dodis).
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Concordances are the basic blocks of metagrid. A concordance can have one to infinite persons. There is no longer - like in v1 and v2 - such a thing like a person resource. We understand a single person as a concordance with just one person. This conceptual shift make things easier. If everything is a concordance we can just update and merge concordances, nothing else. We no longer need to keep separated resource to track changes.
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The shift toward `only concordances` changed the implementation of metagrid dramatically. We dropped several rest endpoints and entities in the database. We now use a very slim denormalized datamodel with nearly no relations.
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## Matching
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To improve the production of concordances metagrid provides a semi-automatic matching function. A project can match their resources against all other projects. Over a simple interface users can accept or refuse those proposals. This improves productivity.
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## Widget
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A widget is a small javascript snippet to include the links from metagrid into a project website. Metagrid provides a jquery client, a vue client (thanx to hallernet) and a php client. |