Standards

Standards and Interoperability

GeoExhibit is designed to support institutional stewardship, cross-system interoperability, and long-term discovery of digital collections. The platform implements the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) using the full set of 15 core elements, providing a widely accepted, repository-neutral baseline for descriptive metadata. This standards-based approach facilitates consistent cataloging practices, improves search and retrieval, and supports downstream aggregation and reporting needs. GeoExhibit also supports the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) to enable automated metadata exchange with institutional repositories, discovery layers, consortial systems, and other research infrastructure. Together, Dublin Core and OAI-PMH help ensure that GeoExhibit content can be integrated into broader digital scholarship and cultural heritage ecosystems while aligning with common compliance expectations for metadata portability and programmatic access.

Dublin Core Metadata Elements (15)

• Title

• Creator

• Subject

• Description

• Publisher

• Contributor

• Date

• Type

• Format

• Identifier

• Source

• Language

• Relation

• Coverage

• Rights

OAI-PMH Endpoint (Examples)

GeoExhibit exposes an OAI-PMH endpoint for standards-based harvesting:

• Base OAI-PMH URL: https://geoexhibit.acugis.com/oai.php

Common OAI-PMH requests include:

• Identify (repository information):
  https://geoexhibit.acugis.com/oai.php?verb=Identify

• List supported metadata formats:
  https://geoexhibit.acugis.com/oai.php?verb=ListMetadataFormats

• List records (Dublin Core) for harvesting:
  https://geoexhibit.acugis.com/oai.php?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc

• List record headers only (lighter-weight sync):
  https://geoexhibit.acugis.com/oai.php?verb=ListIdentifiers&metadataPrefix=oai_dc

• Fetch a single record by identifier (example):
  https://geoexhibit.acugis.com/oai.php?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_dc&identifier=oai:geolite.acugis.com:story/1

Citation & Research Use

GeoExhibit supports scholarly citation and research workflows through embedded COinS (ContextObjects in Spans) metadata on all public exhibits. This allows reference managers such as Zotero to automatically detect and capture structured citation information—including title, URL, date, and creator—directly from maps, timelines, stories, and other published content. By exposing standardized, machine-readable metadata in the page source, GeoExhibit ensures that public exhibits can be reliably cited, preserved, and reused in academic writing, digital humanities projects, and institutional repositories.