ThreeSixtyGiving / standard

The 360Giving data standard for UK philanthropic giving
http://www.threesixtygiving.org
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`weight` properties in the schema #362

Closed mrshll1001 closed 1 month ago

mrshll1001 commented 1 year ago

Lots of properties defined in 360-giving-schema.json contain obscure weight properties with seemingly random values e.g.

(From Transaction, starting line 370)

{
          "description": "A description of this transaction.",
          "weight": 9,
          "title": "Description"
        },
        "provider": {
          "type": [
            "string",
            "null"
          ],
          "description": "The organisation identifier of the provider of transaction funds.",
          "weight": 0.6,
          "title": "Provider"
        }
}

The values of weight are quite varied and do not seem to follow a pattern. There are weight values of 6, 5, 6.01, 4.001, 0.01, 25, 3.3 etc etc.

Our current understanding within ODSC is that weight is not used by any of our tooling for displaying information about the schema in any docs, but we could be mistaken. Our best guess is that they were added as a by-product of some schema-authoring tooling.

We are planning to remove these properties in a PATCH process, likely scheduled to coincide with an upcoming MINOR standard upgrade.

@practicalparticipation , a quick git blame indicates that you added most of these across 2015–2016 (with a few being added by @edugomez in 2018 as well). Can you remember if these properties were added for a specific reason or are indeed a side-effect of tooling? If they serve some purpose it would be great to know so we don't create problems by removing them.