How to use Keyword, Term, Vocabulary, and Vocabulary URLs?

[Ken Mankoff]

Hello,

We're beginning to upload datasets to our Dataverse, but I'm not sure what to do with the Keyword, Term, Vocabulary, and Vocabulary URL fields. So far people are just adding whatever keywords they want. I'm concerned that will pollute their utility. Can these fields be used to limit keywords? Is there a way to use a set of approved keywords from, say, the Geoscience domain? Or to add our own set based on our own institutional vocabulary?

Thanks,

   -k.

[Sebastian Karcher]

There's been a fair amount of discussion about this. We manually enforce controlled vocabularies during curation, but that's obviously difficult to scale and only works for curated repositories. I think the most active ticket is https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/issues/6154 with CIMMYT demoing a working solution there. I think this was also discussed at the community meeting, but I wasn't at that session.

All the best,

Sebastian

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Sebastian Karcher, PhD
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[Philip Durbin]

A couple things. Sebastian is definitely right that there's been a lot of discussion about this over the years (and dev effort from the community) and I suspect it will come up in the newly formed working group about flexible metadata, which you are welcome to join: https://groups.google.com/g/dataverse-community/c/EY0dduRj3Ac/m/EDcEQHLoAwAJ

In practice, what people have done is create their own "custom metadata block" for Geoscience or whatever domain they come from. You can certainly create controlled vocabularies if you go this route. Docs at http://guides.dataverse.org/en/4.20/admin/metadatacustomization.html

I hope this helps,

Phil

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Philip Durbin
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[DAVID PIEDRA]

Maybe this discussion is out of date, but I am facing the same doubts. What's the point of using Term, Vocabulary and Vocabulary URL? Even it's under discussion, and customization is possible, is there any standard way of proceeding? Let's say I want to add the keyboard "Plasmodium vivax", what should I add in vocabulary and vocabulary URL? MeSH and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/68010966, for example?

Thanks in advance,

[Julian Gautier]

Hi David,

You're right, in the Term field you would add Plasmodium vivax. In the Vocabulary field,  MeSH appears to be what's entered most often.

In the Vocabulary URL field you would add "the web presence that describes the keyword vocabulary, if appropriate. Enter an absolute URL where the keyword vocabulary web site is found, such as http://www.my.org." In the base of MeSH, I'm not sure if that should be https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mesh or https://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/meshhome.html, although the datasets of most of the 49 Dataverse repositories whose metadata I've collected have used https://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/.

Dataverse's Vocabulary URL field is taken from the DDI Codebook 2.5 schema, where it "specifies the location for the full controlled vocabulary." I don't have experience with the development of Codebook 2.5, but maybe this was created at a time when it wasn't common for vocabulary terms to each have their own URIs? In any case, the need for Dataverse to be able to record the term URI (either as something the data depositor enters or as something that Dataverse automatically associates with a term that the depositor has chosen from a list of terms) has been brought up during Dataverse community conversations (as well as in a DDI Codebook working group).

[DAVID PIEDRA]

HI Julian,

Thank you very much for your explanation. Now it makes sense. I take not of the "MeSH" url used in the most of 49 dataverse... 1000000 lemmings cannot be wrong :).

Kind regards,

David

[Julian Gautier]

1000000 lemmings cannot be wrong :).

Hahaha, point taken. =)

Maybe some better arguments: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mesh seems like the better choice since it's part of the term URIs (e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/68010966) and it's the URL that MeSH uses when it wants to link to its vocab (e.g. on https://id.nlm.nih.gov/mesh)

[Youn Noh]

Does DDI Codebook 2.5 have term URIs for the elements it defines (e.g., depDate) that can be used when defining fields for a custom metadata block? I apologize for asking on this list, but I don't belong to any DDI groups and couldn't find an answer in the field level documentation and from other searching. Thanks in advance.

[Julian Gautier]

Hi Youn Noh. I'm not sure if DDI Codebook 2.5 has term URIs for the elements it defines. I've had luck learning about the standard by opening tickets in their JIRA at https://ddi-alliance.atlassian.net/jira/software/c/projects/DDICODE/issues.

You might also get help by emailing ddi-...@icpsr.umich.edu, and those emails are forwarded to the DDI Users Google Group at https://groups.google.com/g/icpsr-ddi-users.