Capture Attribute Terms (Enumerants) in Metadata

[UnclePoole]

Attributes describing qualitative values - aka enums aka codelists - are present in CDB 1.2 and the list of valid values - aka enumerants aka codes aka vocabulary terms - for each attribute are documented in the human-readable specification with both the vocabulary term name and its integer numeric value (index).

However, the machine-readable XML metadata does not contain any of this information and treats these attribute types as raw integers with only a minimum and maximum value constraint.

The conceptual model in the CDB 1.2 specification does align with how GGDM treats such attributes, so there is no fundamental incompatibility, and the proposed CDB X dictionary design accounts for properly tracking the terms for qualitative attributes in a machine-readable way in SQLite. The actual list of term names and integer values may change in GGDM though so mapping will have to accommodate that.

It may make sense as a transition path to update CDB 1.3 to define additional XML elements in a backward compatible way to capture these definitions from the existing specification into the machine-readable XML metadata.