Default fields

[dleadbetter]

In order to provide users with some guidance on how to add and configure user defined fields, we should "ship" this feature with some default fields for specific models. There exist some tables which we'll want to recommend how they are modeled (people, places, etc) and provide additional features related to those tables (VIAF/Wikidata lookup for people, geo-location for places, etc).

Design Notes

• Which models do we want to provide by default?
• What other features should we offer associated with these models?

Implementation Notes

• Model schema should be stored in a configuration file (YAML?)
• Migrations should be generated at installation time
  • No need to pre-generate

[dleadbetter]

@jamiefolsom - Is this something we'll want for the first version of this feature?

[jamiefolsom]

@dleadbetter it makes sense to me for us to build out these defaults as they are needed, using projects to define the required fields. But the ones I suspect we'll want, if we want to stub them in, or take a first pass on basic fields, include:

• Documents (AKA sources, bibliographic materials, where library data will be the authorities to which we might make requests for data. There are a number of standards we might want to refer to for these. TEI, Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records or FRBR for the concept model, MARC and BIBFRAME)
• People. To my knowledge there isn't a single standard for Linked Open Data about people. Nick may be aware of one. VIAF and Wikidata are authorities.
• Time: Not just (fuzzy) dates, but also periods, spans, eras, etc, whether stand-alone, or embedded within other objects: birth/death, start/end, 18c, circa 1900, Common Era, etc. Periodo is operating in this space, and Extended Date/Time Format is a Library of Congress standard we might want to consider.
• Places (points, polygons, likely with a time dimension. Names of places change, boundaries of named places change. Sometimes a point is enough, other times more than one point is needed, other times a polygon or more than one are needed. Linked Places, the World Historical Gazetter, and Pelagios are all operating in this space)
• Phenomena ("Everything else": Events in space and time, people in places and time, objects in space and time, trajectories, intersections, etc. Linked Traces is an emerging Linked Open Data standard for capturing phenomena)