Externally controlled vocabulary support

[janvanmansum]

Context

This external controlled vocabularies functionality was developed by Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS-KNAW), the Netherlands, and funded by SSHOC, "Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud". SSHOC has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 project call H2020-INFRAEOSC-04-2018, grant agreement #823782.

Please watch this online presentation, read the document with requirements and join Dataverse Working Group on Ontologies and Controlled Vocabularies if you have some questions and want to contribute.

Motivation

(Note: the text below is adapted from an analysis document by @qqmyers and @4tikhonov. Some of the initial requirements have been dropped and a few others have been added.)

Current CVOC-support

Dataverse supports use of internally managed controlled vocabularies as part of metadata blocks. Any metadata block field can be associated with a fixed list of terms that are the allowed values for that field. The user interface for entering values supports picking from a drop-down list of all available values. The display interface simply shows the value used. (The Geospatial block country field is an example).

Dataverse also allows un-verified entry of metadata from external controlled vocabularies. In these cases, a compound field is often used so that the user can specify the name/URI of the vocabulary used. Examples include the keyword and topic fields which include subfields for the vocabulary URI and name, and the term (value in the vocabulary) chosen (without a field for a URL of the value itself).

New feature: externally managed controlled vocabularies, with URI-defined terms

In order to overcome the limitations of the currently available options a new feature is proposed: the ability to configure a compound field with four subfields for: vocabulary name, vocabulary URL, term and term URL respectively.

Requirements:

• Enable metadata fields to be associated with external vocabularies.
• Enable Dataverse to store the URI for vocabulary values.
• Support auto-complete for internal/external CVOCs.
• Allow fields to be associated with multiple vocabularies and/or support controlled and free-text values (e.g. for keywords).
• Gracefully handle situations where an external vocabulary is temporarily or permanently off-line.
• Change the display to allow linking out to an external page for a given term.
• Support migration of existing fields/values to any new CVOC-capability
• Support use of CVOCs as query terms, e.g. in advanced search, or adding a link/button to find datasets with the same CVOC near the term itself in metadata displays.
• CVOC term entry via API.
• Fields that are associated with a single vocabulary should preselect the vocabulary.
• URL-subfields must not be editable by the user, as they are auto-filled based on a selection from a list.

[4tikhonov]

This external controlled vocabularies functionality was developed by Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS-KNAW), the Netherlands, and funded by SSHOC, "Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud". SSHOC has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 project call H2020-INFRAEOSC-04-2018, grant agreement #823782.

Please watch this online presentation, read the document with requirements and join Dataverse Working Group on Ontologies and Controlled Vocabularies if you have some questions and want to contribute.