[FEATURE] RDF serialization of ROR records

[zozlak]

v2

We would love to have a possibility to fetch the ROR data as the RDF. The actual serialization does not matter. As the ROR is tightly coupled with the JSON, I assume the JSON-LD would be the most convenient format on the ROR side.

Unfortunately this is a big topic which can be approached in multiple ways, e.g.

• A total revamp of the ROR schema so that the ROR's json schema defines a structure being a valid JSON-LD document. This is how it was done e.g. by the IIIF community (the domain is completely different but the problem or how to have beloved-by-programmers-json which is still a proper linked data is the same).
• By implementing JSON-LD as an alternative data serialization format which a REST API client can request.

No matter the implementation a decision has to be made on creation of an own RDF schema or reuse of an existing ones (e.g. from schema.org, foaf, etc.).

Yet another question is how to formally describe the mapping, e.g. a json schema plus an JSON-LD context file or with some OWL ontology or by somehow including the RDF mapping in the json schema comments or whatever.

The benefit of availability of the ROR data as an RDF would be a better interoperability of the ROR data thanks to following the W3C's linked data guidelines and most authority control services support RDF serialization of their data and there are big toolchains for harmonization of RDF data coming in different schemas.

In our particular example we would like to use it for a validation of metadata during a repository ingest and extracting from the ROR basic information on organizations which we need to present in the repository GUI. While we can obviously add ROR support by writign a fully ROR-custom data processing code, we would prefer to be able to fetch the data in the RDF which would allow to push it trough our existing toolchain by only adjusting its configuration.