R&D: Possibilities for setting up Questioning Authority for reconciliation with Open Refine

[arwenhutt]

Descriptive summary

We would like to be able to use Questioning Authority with Open Refine
for batch reconciliation.

It could help to simplify, standardize, and speed up reconciliation for digital collections headings.

Related work

Questioning Authority https://github.com/samvera/questioning_authority
An openrefine reconcilition endpoint for use with Samvera's Questioning Authority. https://github.com/UCSCLibrary/qa-or-reconcile

Matt's Notes

Since the latest version of QA is not compatible with our damspas application, one idea for this R&D would be to create a very simple Rails 5 application that provides QA for OpenRefine integration.

It would probably be worth seeing if this could be done with a Rails API project, since really no frontend/views are needed here, as far as I'm aware.

If we go this route, we'll want to likely work with someone in Arwen's group on the OpenRefine integration since they have more expertise in that software and what to expect from the integration.

[mcritchlow]

Unfortunately, this gem is not compatible with our damspas application. It requires version 5 of the Rails framework, and damspas is stuck on Rails 4.

Edit: To clarify slightly, there are old versions of the qa gem that we could theoretically use from back when QA did support Rails 4. This is the last version that supported Rails 4.x, which is quite a while ago and a few hundred commits behind the current version.

[arwenhutt]

@mcritchlow I updated the title of this issue to switch it to an R&D ticket like we talked about in the DAMS-WG meeting yesterday :)

[mcritchlow]

@arwenhutt - sounds good. I added some notes to the description reflecting what I think we talked about too.