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cite-architecture / citeobj

Collections of citable objects
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Document model of citable object, and relation of URNs, labels and collection-specific properties #40

Open Eumaeus opened 7 years ago

Eumaeus commented 7 years ago

An object's urn and label are recorded as properties in the .cex file, but do not get included in the Vector returned by PropertyList.

This may be just fine… but it confused me for a while. It might be worth thinking about whether we want to include those with all the other properties in the data model.

neelsmith commented 7 years ago

No, we don't. The abstract model of a citable object is precisely:

  1. it is identified by a URN
  2. it has a human-readable label
  3. it has 0 or more typed properties

The scala implementation expresses this very accurately. The fact that it's convenient to serialize this in a single delimited-text record per object is not a criticism of the model or the scala implementation of the model. (It may be a valid criticism of the plain-text representation. I'm inclined to favor a simple row-per-object model, even though it means URNs and labels are not visually distinguished from collection-specific properties, but if you think that's a problem, let's pick that topic up.

Leaving this issue open as an issue for documentation -- need to explain the model of citable obect somewhere -- but not as an issue for changing the model or its scala representation.