CSV Import of relational data

I’m trying to migrate our existing dataset to Omeka S and everything is working fine so far. I can import CSV files and map the columns to properties. There is one thing I don’t know exactly how to proceed.

Our dataset is, of course, relational. For example do we have an item set with places. Then we do have another item set with agents and those can have birthplace and deathplace as properties. In the mappings configuration of a column > property I can chose Omeka resource (by ID) as data type. But in my provided csv I don’t have the omeka ressource ID, but the ID from the system we had in place before.

How do I import such a case?

Thanks in advance for any tipps on how to solve this :slight_smile:

We have an issue open now about this very problem, of allowing CSV Imports to.

Right now the option is to do your imports in parts and then match up the resulting Omeka S IDs with the data you have so you can have the IDs necessary to make the connection. Obviously this is pretty clunky.

Hello @jflatnes and thank you very much for your reply

That was one possible solution I was considering. But I’ve got 57 interlinked tables at hand and I really really want to avoid making the situation more complicated :slight_smile:

Besides minor hickups I’ve been testing @Daniel_KM’s BulkImport module succesfully. It enabled me to import relations via unique a dcterms:identifier. I just prepend the internal database id with the table name and that works like a charm after with naming the column something like agent:birthplace ^^resource:item. The module does the magic of finding and linking up.

Thanks for the input!

I definitely understand: being able to use a piece of data that you already know before the import would make this much easier to do. And it’s definitely something we’re looking to add to CSV Import.

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