A convention for improving citations in markdown documents using CURIEs.
When referring to a country, local authority
or indeed anything recorded in a GOV.UK register
use the <register-name>:<key-value> as a link-label:
[The Czech Republic][country:CZ]
[Ashlyns School][school-eng:117578]
[BT Ltd][company:02216369]
[Cabinet Office][government-organisation:cabinet-office]
[Minister for the Cabinet Office][government-role:minister-for-the-cabinet-office]
[Francis Maude][government-person:francis-maude]
The displayed text can be whatever you like, as can be the shortcut reference, which can be a link to a human-friendly page:
[country:CZ]: https://www.gov.uk/government/world/czech-republic
[school-eng:117578]: https://www.compare-school-performance.service.gov.uk/school/117578
[company:02216369]: https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/02216369
[government-organisation:cabinet-office]: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/cabinet-office
[government-person:francis-maude]: https://www.gov.uk/government/people/francis-maude
[government-role:minister-for-the-cabinet-office]: https://www.gov.uk/government/ministers/minister-for-the-cabinet-office
The text will be rendered by any markdown processor as follows:
- The Czech Republic
- BT Ltd
- Ashlyns School
- Cabinet Office
- Minister for the Cabinet Office
- Francis Maude
Tools can help editors ensure consistent naming in documents and make global changes, for example, to update the text when an organisation changes its name.
Improving the precision of links helps with search and analysis, especially where the same text can refer to multiple things.
We can write markdown processors which use the CURIEs to produce microdata, RDFa, JSON-LD and other annotations.
This simple idea won the 'solved problem' prize at the Accountability Hack 2016, though much of the day was spent exploring text mining tools and extending editors, notably Dillinger as tools to support this way of working — see the hackday notes.