django-controlled-vocabulary 0.1.0

Link your data to authority lists or your own controlled lists

Django Controlled Vocabulary

Facilitates linkage to remote standard vocabularies (e.g. language codes, geonames) within the Django Admin to increase the consistency and understandability of your project data.

Features

• Lets you create your own controlled lists of terms (i.e. local lists)
• [TODO] look up terms from remote vocabularies (i.e. authority lists)
• plug-in architecture for lookups into particular vocabularies:
  • Hard-coded lists: DCMI types
  • CSV
  • Python libraries
  • [TODO] Sparql: TGN
  • [TODO] Rest API
• Built-in vocabulary plug-ins:
  • ISO 639-2 (Language codes)
  • DCMI Type (Dublin Core resource types)
• stores used terms from remote vocabularies:
  • space efficient (don't clutter the database with unused terms)
  • self-contained (i.e. can still works offline & DB always 'semantically' complete)
• [TODO] possibility to store additional metadata (e.g. geonames coordinates)
• simple rest API to publish your own terms
• autocomplete input widget for django admin
  • [TODO] vocabulary selector

Data Models

• ControlledVocabulary
  • label, prefix, base_url, description
• ControlledTerm:
  • label, termid, vocabulary (-> ControlledVocabulary)

Limitations

• controlled list rather than fully fledged vocabularies, (i.e. just a bag of terms with unique IDs/URIs, no support for taxonomic relationships among terms like broader, narrower, synonyms, ...)
• no notion of granularity (e.g. geonames country, region, city, street are all treated as part of the same vocabulary)

Setup

Installation

TODO

Add the app to the INSTALLED_APPS list in your Django settings file:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    # other apps
    'controlled_vocabulary',
]

Run the migrations:

./manage.py migrate

Configuration

Enabling vocabulary plug-ins

A Vocabulary plug-in / manager is a python class that provide services for a vocabulary:

• implement the search() method used to dynamically look up terms in the admin interface
• supplies metadata for the vocabulary

Add the following code in your settings.py to enable vocabularies based on the import path of their classes.

# List of import paths to vocabularies lookup classes
# you can overwrite this in your django settings.py
CONTROLLED_VOCABULARY_VOCABULARIES = [
    'controlled_vocabulary.vocabularies.iso639_2',
    'controlled_vocabulary.vocabularies.dcmitype',
]

After enabling new vocabularies you'll need to run the following django command create or update records in the database for all enabled vocabulary plug-ins.

./manage.py vocab update

Note that this command only adds or update but never removes vocabularies from the database or changes terms.

Usage

To define a controlled term in your Django Model, use the following field:

from controlled_vocabulary.models import ControlledTermField

    language_code = ControlledTermField(
        'iso639-2', 
        null=True, blank=True
    )

Where 'iso639-2' is the prefix of a controlled vocabulary in your database.