Combine is a Django application to facilitate the harvesting, transformation, analysis, and publishing of metadata records by Service Hubs for inclusion in the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).

The name "Combine", pronounced /kämˌbīn/, is a nod to the combine harvester used in farming famous for, "combining three separate harvesting operations - reaping, threshing, and winnowing - into a single process" Instead of grains, we have metadata records! These metadata records may come in a variety of metadata formats, various states of transformation, and may or may not be valid in the context of a particular data model. Like the combine equipment used for farming, this application is designed to provide a single point of interaction for multiple steps along the way of harvesting, transforming, and analyzing metadata in preperation for inclusion in DPLA.

Documentation is available at Read the Docs.

Combine has a fair amount of server components, dependencies, and configurations that must be in place to work, as it leverages Apache Spark, among other applications, for processing on the backend. There are a couple of deployment options.

A GitHub repository Combine-Docker exists to help stand up an instance of Combine as a series of interconnected Docker containers.

To this end, use the repository, Combine-playbook, which has been created to assist with provisioning a server with everything neccessary, and in place, to run Combine. This repository provides routes for server provisioning via Vagrant and/or Ansible. Please visit the Combine-playbook repository for more information about installation.