Hi,
I’m new to Omeka S. At the moment I’m evaluating whether we can use it for our use case. Currently we are using Collective Access.
One thing I need to model is the following: We have persons as items. A person has a Name and any number of alternative names. An alternative has six elements: First Name, Last Name, Birth Name, Time period for wearing the name, Note, Source reference. So in Collective Access we have these fields grouped and the group can be repeated any number of times.
What is the best way to implement this in Omeka S?
Thanks a lot and kind regards,
Martin
There’s no native “repeatable grouping of properties” feature in Omeka S. But there are other ways to accomplish this.
You could go the linked data route and make each name group an item. Create a “Name” resource template and assign the properties you need. Then, create all the “Name” items for a person. Then, link those items to the “Person” item using “Omeka resource” values.
You could go the value annotation route and make each name a property value (which are repeatable) and annotate each one with the properties you need.
It is possible to make a new, compound data type that puts all the data you need into one value. Although, this will require creating a new module.
Thank you for the quick reply.
I was afraid that creating a Name resource template would be the natural way to do it in Omeka S. We have more than 15000 Persons in the database. I have doubts if that’s manageable.
The value annotation route sounds interesting. I don’t like that the value annotation isn’t really visible in the backend but maybe that’s solvable by a module we could create.
Could I ask you to give some more details about creating a module for a compound data type? Would that require to create a module for every compound data type? We have several. This sound promising none the less. Do you have an example for an implementation, maybe?
Could I ask you to give some more details about creating a module for a compound data type? Would that require to create a module for every compound data type? We have several. This sound promising none the less. Do you have an example for an implementation, maybe?
The NumericDataTypes module has several compound data types. “Timestamp,” for example, includes several fields for one property value, including year, month, day, hour, minute, second, offset. Of course these all resolve to a numeric timestamp in the database. Your data type could resolve to JSON array containing any data you want.
Thank you, that’s really helpful.