Create data infrastructure for structured, linkable best practice documentation

[stuartasutton]

Jeanne, Nate and I had a set of email exchanges a year ago (2018-03-03 through 2018-03-19) and by Jeanne in an email exchange on 2018-04-03 about the possibility/feasibility of creating a best practice infrastructure based on the best practices (BP) database used by DataOne. Take a look at the BP landing page for the Data One application and at a good example best practice, "Define the Data Model". Such an infrastructure for us, however, would use RDF for the modeling with each BP identified by URI. This would allow us to link to an appropriate BP from our Handbooks for deeper coverage, from our property and class tables where they are the focus of the BP, etc. etc.

I am raising this issue again because we are launching into updates to our Handbooks to reflect changes since they were created. There will be a temptation to pull into the Handbooks best practice matters that would be better handled through structured BPs. The Handbooks, the CTDL and CTDL-ASN term tables and other documentation could reverence these BPs via callouts etc.

Here's an exchange between Nate and me that I'd like to pick up on and then see if there is a path forward.

Stuart to Nate (2018-03-19):

Nate, in your massively available free time, could you take a look at the DataOne (https://www.dataone.org/best-practices) schema and functionality for describing best practices? What would it take to implement a CE best practice database (json-ld) to interface with data that followed the schema and basic DataOne functionality (e.g., see https://www.dataone.org/best-practices/ensure-datasets-used-are-reproducible):

Best practice description Rationale Related best practices Additional resources Examples Tags

As linked data, such best practices could be linked to from anywhere throughout our schema and system documentation."

Nate to Stuart (2018-03-19):

Just to make sure I understand:

This "best practices" thing is a schema for defining best practices You want to get a sense of what it would take to create a system (presumably on the credreg.net site) that would enable:

Create/Read/Update/Delete functionality (basically, content management) Documenting best practices for a given schema, using the "best practices" schema's classes/properties (e.g. { "bp:description": "Some description text here" }) Referencing that documentation from elsewhere (as JSON-LD)

Correct?

Sounds like an interesting side-project, potentially. A lot of the pieces are already there.

[siuc-nate]

What would an example of this be? And would it relate at all to the recommended benchmark stuff?

[siuc-nate]

Examples: https://github.com/CredentialEngine/CatalogingGuidance/issues

[stuartasutton]

@siuc-nate, the cataloging guidance instances found you mention above ( https://github.com/CredentialEngine/Schema-Development/issues/584#issuecomment-498800830) are practices that could benefit from best practice guidance but not really example documentation since they don't follow an specific documentation format.

[siuc-nate]

See #800