Add New Topics to 'Kind of Data' Field in Dataverse

[Tutasi]

A user has asked us whether it is possible to add specific topics such as ‘medical images’ or ‘images’ to the ‘kind of data’ field to better categorize and describe the datasets being uploaded.  

Has anyone else customized the 'kind of data' field in their Dataverse instance, and if so, could you share your experiences or any challenges faced?  

[Jacek Chudzik]

Hi,

we went the path of customizing the citation.tsv file and we added child field for kind of data filed with allowControlledVocabulary set to true. In extra vocabulary we added categories like Laboratory data (measurements, samples, notebooks, protocols, etc.),  Mathematical models or Pictures.  Works like a charm.

But... After over a year and several Datavers updates, we see that we made a mistake. If we had to start over, we would never have chosen to modify the citation.tsv file. Moreover, we are considering restoring the original citation.tsv file and migrating additional metadata to a custom metadata block.

So, if you plan to keep the repository up to date I advise you: do not modify the citation.tsv file.

If you plan to keep the repository at a given version and not upgrade - changing citation.tsv may be the solution to your problem.

Regards,

Jacek

[gwenaël doux]

Hi all,

We recently modified the KindOfData field using the CVOC (https://guides.dataverse.org/en/latest/installation/config.html#cvocconf) functionality. We could use the contrlolledvocabularycustomjavascript (https://guides.dataverse.org/en/latest/installation/config.html#controlledvocabularycustomjavascript) but in a Slack thread, Jim Myers suggest me :" In general, I would suggest using the external vocabulary mechanism that will annotate the specified field with some data-* attributes that make it easy for your script to find the field." 

This allows us to override the citations.tsv block with controlled vocabularies without modifying it. The JavaScript file we've created adds a limited list of values, in our case, the dataType list from DataCite.

Gwenaël

[gwenaël doux]

I would also add that modifying the citation.tsv can disrupt the harvesting of a repository. An issue  is open to fix this problem.