Research Vocabularies Australia other service updates
See also the page Research Vocabularies Australia Changelog, which covers changes made to RVA's Portal and Registry software.
This page covers other user-visible changes made to the RVA service, for example, changes to configuration and to the content hosted on the demo or production servers.
13 August 2024 (demo), 20 August 2024 (production)
(Defect) Linked Data API (SISSVoc): Updated the Linked Data API configuration to display dcterms:title as the resource description when a prefLabel is not available.
The RVA linked data API's previous HTML rendering of SKOS concept schemes defaulted to using part of the IRI identifier when a prefLabel was unavailable. This issue has been resolved by configuring dcterms:title as a fallback resource description, ensuring the proper display of scheme titles.
30 January 2024 (demo), 6 February 2024 (production)
(Defect) Linked Data API (SISSVoc): Don’t offer view or sort options that wouldn’t work
The right-hand side panels of the Linked Data API (a.k.a. SISSVoc, Elda) offer view and sort options, which you can click to select. However, it was often the case that some of these options did not work; if you clicked the links, you were shown an error page. Now, only view and sort options that would work are offered.
16 January 2024 (demo), 23 January 2024 (production)
(Defect) Linked Data API (SISSVoc): Gracefully ignore empty view and sort fields in URLs
It is possible to construct URLs that access the Linked Data API (a.k.a. SISSVoc, Elda), in which there are empty view and/or sort field criteria specified. The resulting page displays these as blank entries in the corresponding right-hand panels. This has now been fixed; empty view and/or sort field criteria specified in the URL are silently ignored.
16 January 2024 (demo)
(Enhancement) Portal: use header banner to indicate server identity, and switch to production mode
The demo server’s Portal displays a “server identification” banner at the top of every page, to indicate to users that it is the demo server. However, the functionality that implements this banner also has the effect of putting the Portal into a “development” mode. In general, there is no observable difference in behaviour between the demo and main production servers; however, the demo server is a “production-level” server and the Portal should be operating in the “production” mode. The demo server’s Portal will now be switched to “production” mode, and the “server identification” banner will be implemented using the new header banner provided by Version 2.0.1.
19 December 2023 (production)
(Enhancement) Improve production server’s Registry and Repository data backup regime
The production server’s backup scripts for the Registry and Repository data will now be run as a low-privilege system user.
14 November 2023 (demo), 21 November 2023 (production)
(Enhancement) Linked Data API (SISSVoc): apply upstream changes
The changes made upstream (in the master SISS/SISSVoc repository) to endpoint configuration have been applied.
The changes are as follows:
A value has been specified for the
api:baseproperty. This should have no user-visible effect.Two new endpoint patterns have been added (whose behaviour corresponds to the corresponding two
/concept?...endpoints, but which return all matching resources, not only SKOS Concepts):/resource?anylabel={text}/resource?labelcontains={text}
The SPARQL query of these endpoint patterns has been modified so that the results include only resources that are SKOS Concepts, not arbitrary resources:
/concept?anylabel={text}/concept?labelcontains={text}
The SPARQL query of these endpoint patterns has been modified so that the results do not include duplicates:
/concept?anylabel={text}/concept?labelcontains={text}/concept/broader?anylabel={text}/concept/narrower?anylabel={text}/concept/broaderTransitive?anylabel={text}/concept/narrowerTransitive?anylabel={text}
17 October 2023 (demo), 24 October 2023 (production)
(Defect) Linked Data API (SISSVoc) HTML: fix behaviour of clearing a non-first sort field
When viewing a Linked Data API (a.k.a. SISSVoc, Elda) page, you can add multiple sort field criteria using the right-hand-side panel. If you then cancel an active sort field that's not the one listed first, the display of sort criteria gets messed up: you get one or more "empty" sort criteria displayed. This has now been fixed; cancelling a sort field criterion behaves as expected.
(Defect) Linked Data API (SISSVoc) HTML: restore help icons/buttons in right-hand-side panels
Each of the right-hand-side panels of Linked Data API (a.k.a. SISSVoc, Elda) pages should offer help via a question-mark icon in the panel header. These icons were hidden, and the help was inaccessible. The icons have now been restored. Click one of the question-mark icons to display a popup with help about that panel. Click the icon again to hide the panel.
(Defect) Linked Data API (SISSVoc) HTML: fix behaviour of less/greater filters on item endpoint
When viewing a Linked Data API (a.k.a. SISSVoc, Elda) page, some properties are shown with “<“ and “>” buttons next to the values. Under certain circumstances, clicking one of these buttons would display an error page. This has now been fixed; clicking one of these buttons now implements filtering correctly.
15 August 2023 (demo), 22 August 2023 (production)
(Enhancement) Portal: remove Facebook login option
The Portal provides several login options, including using a Facebook account. Due to recent changes to Facebook policy, ARDC is currently unable to offer the Facebook login option. The option has been removed from the Portal’s Login page. (There is no timeframe for restoring this function.)
4 July 2023 (demo), 11 July 2023 (production)
(Enhancement) Linked Data API: add shortname for schema.org url property
The Linked Data API (a.k.a. SISSVoc and Elda) pages for a resource now uses the shortname schemaUrl for the property https://schema.org/url. On HTML pages, the shortname is displayed as schema url. This change applies only to content published subsequent to the deployment of this change. (For content published before this change, the property is shown with the automatically-generated shortname url_2985.) For further information about shortnames, please refer to the Elda reference documentation at https://epimorphics.github.io/elda/current/reference.html.
6 June 2023 (production)
(Enhancement) First deployment of Community Lens Finding Aid content
This change applies to the production service only.
The production service has a new Community Lens Finding Aid added, accessible via a new top-level "COMMUNITY LENSES" menu. This is the first step in providing guidance to users to assist them in finding vocabularies of interest within particular research domains. The initial release includes content in the domain of environmental and earth sciences.
The demo service already offers this Community Lens Finding Aid content.
2 May 2023 (demo), 9 May 2023 (production)
(Enhancement) Apache HTTP Server configuration and deployment processes: cache CMS tooltip content locally
This change applies to both the demo and production service.
The Portal's vocabulary add/edit page, known as the CMS page, has a number of entry fields for which help is available as a tooltip, the content of which is displayed by hovering over the 
icon in the field's label. The content of these tooltips has previously been loaded from this documentation server. Going forward, the content is cached locally with the Portal. This enables the tooltip content to remain accessible during outages of the documentation server.
4 April 2023 (demo)
(Fix defect) Registry configuration and some existing vocabularies: change demo endpoint URLs from http://... to https://...
This change is applicable to the demo server (https://demo.vocabs.ardc.edu.au/) only, and not to the production service https://vocabs.ardc.edu.au/.
As part of the general migration of server hostnames from ANDS-branding to ARDC-branding, in January 2020 we performed a migration of demo RVA that not only changed the URL of the "front door" from "demo.ands.org.au/vocabs" to "demo.vocabs.ardc.edu.au", but that also included the intention of moving away from the use of all URLs beginning http://... to https://... . And the intention pretty much became reality in this sense: all URLs beginning http://demo.vocabs.ardc.edu/... do now immediately return a redirect response to the equivalent URL beginning https://... . And the https-based URLs work correctly. Unfortunately, the migration process was incomplete: on vocabulary view pages we continue to advertise some http://-based URLs, but they don't now always work correctly in all contexts.
This error applies particularly to the URLs of SPARQL endpoints and Linked Data API endpoints created between January 2020 and the present.
During the migration window, the advertised URLs of SPARQL endpoints and Linked Data API endpoints was rewritten to use "https" instead of "http", and the default for newly-created endpoints has been changed to "https".