*The Collections Working Group of the Research Data Alliance (RDA)
(https://www.rd-alliance.org/groups/pid-collections-wg.html) is a
multidisciplinary effort to develop a cross-community approach to
building, maintaining and sharing machine-actionable collections of data
objects. We have developed an abstract data model for collections and an
API that can be implemented by existing collection solutions. Our goal
is to facilitate cross-collection interoperability and the development
of common tools and services for sharing and expanding data collections
within and across disciplines, and within and across repository
boundaries. The RDA Collections API supports
Create/Read/Update/Delete/List (CRUD/L) operations. It also supports
set-based operations for Collections, such as finding matches on like
items, finding the intersection and union of two collections, and
flattening recursive collections. Individual API implementations can
declaratively express, via a standard set of capabilities, the
operations available for their collections. The Perseids Project at
Tufts University is implementing this API for its collection of
annotations on ancient texts. We will review the model and the
functionality of the API and demonstrate how we have applied it to
manage Perseids humanities data. We will also provide examples of how
it is being applied for collections of data in other disciplines,
including Climate Computing and Geoscience. Finally, we will solicit
feedback from the participants in the workshop on the API and model and
its applicability for other collections of cultural heritage data.*
