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OpenURL & KBART

KBART is a NISO recommended practice for the data that flows from content providers into link resolver knowledge bases — and so into the accuracy of OpenURL resolution.

KBART — Knowledge Bases And Related Tools — is a NISO recommended practice (NISO RP-9) describing how content providers should supply title-list data to link resolver knowledge bases. While KBART itself is not OpenURL, the two are tightly coupled: the accuracy with which a resolver can answer an OpenURL request depends directly on the quality of the data in its knowledge base, and KBART is the standard format for that data.

What KBART standardises

KBART specifies a tab-separated file format and a set of recommended fields for title-by-title holdings data — for example, a journal title list from an aggregator describing which journal articles, in which date ranges, are available to a subscribing institution. The file is intended to be exchanged from content provider to library or to a shared knowledge-base operator.

Fields covered include journal title, ISSN/eISSN, coverage dates, embargo, URL of the title at the provider, and various publication metadata. KBART files are produced by hundreds of content providers as part of their normal operations.

How KBART affects OpenURL quality

A resolver answers an OpenURL by matching the Referent against its knowledge base. If the knowledge base is wrong — wrong coverage dates, wrong ISSN, wrong URL — the resolution is wrong too. KBART improves data quality by standardising:

  • The exact fields a knowledge base should expect from a content provider.
  • The character encoding and file format, removing a class of import errors.
  • The interpretation of coverage dates and embargo windows.

NISO's IOTA project (2013) measured OpenURL link quality in part by examining how often the metadata in incoming OpenURLs could be matched against KBART-derived knowledge bases. See Related Work.

Status

KBART is published as a NISO Recommended Practice, designation NISO RP-9. The current version is RP-9-2014, the second edition. Adherence is voluntary, but most major content providers and link-resolver vendors support it.

Sources