Help with Designing Data Structure

Getting Started
1

Greetings,

I have a self-hosted Omeka S instance that I’m hoping to use to organize and display genealogy records from my family history. I’m new to Omeka and trying to figure out how to structure the data. My primary data element is a person, and each person has metadata (birth date, birth place, marriage date, …) each with documentary evidence (census records, marriage license, …). And, of course, the people are related to each other.

I’m trying to figure out how to structure the data in the most useful way. Is each person a data set? Or ???

Any advice would be greatly apapreciated.

2

Thant’s a nice project.

Each person should be an item in the item set “people”

Each item will have fields for relations. You would want to think if the relations will point up (child of) or down (parent of).

As for photos and documents. I suggest creating an item set for documents/photos.

You would want to create items for them too.

This way you will be able to add rich metadata for them. A field in those items can be “mentioned here” that will connect them to items of people.

Hope this helped you a bit.

Hanan Cohen

3

Thank you!

If I set it up this way, can you help me understand how to connect items to each other - like people to other people, or documents to people?

Thanks again!

4

One option for connecting individuals to each other would be to import the Relationship vocabulary – see the “Vocabularies” section of the Omeka S manual for more about this. This allows you to designate people as “Child Of”, “Parent Of”, “Sibling Of”, “Spouse Of”, and other family (or non-family) relationships. You could combine the Relationship vocabulary with the “Inverse Properties” module to automatically designate how individuals relate to each other in reciprocal ways: for example, defining “Parent Of” and “Child Of” as an inverse relationship, when you designate the item representing the person “Eve” as the Parent Of “Abel”, the item “Abel” will automatically be defined as the Child Of “Eve”.

5

I tried the Inverse Properties module and it works great for this. Thanks!

I’m having trouble with the Relationship vocabulary. The URI doesn’t seem to work? Actually, I’m having the same issues with other vocabularies. Maybe I don’t know what I’m doing? I get “No classes or properties found. Are you sure you used the correct namespace URI?”

The URI I used is RELATIONSHIP: A vocabulary for describing relationships between people

Thank you!

6

It works for me using the following:

  • Namespace URI: http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/
  • Import type: URL
  • File URL: https://vocab.org/relationship/rel-vocab-20100607.rdf
  • File format: RDF/XML (.rdf)

Note the trailing / on the namespace URI.

7

Thanks! That worked for me, too.