datasette-reconcile 0.1

Adds a reconciliation API to Datasette.

datasette-reconcile

Adds a reconciliation API endpoint to Datasette, based on the Reconciliation Service API specification.

The reconciliation API is used to match a set of strings to their correct identifiers, to help with disambiguation and consistency in large datasets. For example, the strings "United Kingdom", "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" and "UK" could all be used to identify the country which has the ISO country code GB. It is particularly implemented in OpenRefine.

The plugin adds a /reconcile endpoint to a table served by datasette, which responds based on the Reconciliation Service API specification. In order to activate this endpoint you need to configure the reconciliation service, as dscribed in the usage section.

Installation

Install this plugin in the same environment as Datasette.

$ datasette install datasette-reconcile

Usage

Plugin configuration

The plugin should be configured using Datasette's metadata.json file. The configuration can be put at the root, database or table layer of metadata.json, for most use cases it will make most sense to configure at the table level.

Add a datasette-reconcile object under plugins in metadata.json. This should look something like:

{
    "databases": {
        "sf-trees": {
            "tables": {
                "Street_Tree_List": {
                    "plugins": {
                        "datasette-reconcile": {
                            "id_field": "id",
                            "name_field": "name",
                            "type_field": "type",
                            "type_default": "Tree",
                            "max_limit": 5,
                            "service_name": "Tree reconciliation"
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

The only required item in the configuration is name_field. This refers to the field in the table which will be searched to match the query text.

The rest of the configuration items are optional, and are as follows:

• id_field: The field containing the identifier for this entity. If not provided, and there is a primary key set, then the primary key will be used. A primary key of more than one field will give an error.
• type_field: If provided, this field will be used to determine the type of the entity. If not provided, then the type_default setting will be used instead.
• type_default: If provided, this value will be used as the type of every entity returned. If not provided the default of Object will be used for every entity.
• max_limit: The maximum number of records that a query can request to return. This is 5 by default. A individual query can request fewer results than this, but it cannot request more.
• service_name: The name of the reconciliation service that will appear in the service manifest. If not provided it will take the form <database name> <table name> reconciliation.
• identifierSpace: Identifier space given in the service manifest. If not provided a default of http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/type.object.id is used.
• schemaSpace: Schema space given in the service manifest. If not provided a default of http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/type.object.id is used.

Development

To set up this plugin locally, first checkout the code. Then create a new virtual environment:

cd datasette-reconcile
python3 -mvenv venv
source venv/bin/activate

Or if you are using pipenv:

pipenv shell

Now install the dependencies and tests:

pip install -e '.[test]'

To run the tests:

pytest