Resource attributes
This page discusses how a Resource attribute column can be defined.
See the Attributes page for general information about attribute columns, including when to use one, and a discussion of the difference between Resource attributes and Literal attributes.
For a detailed look at a Resource attribute column's configuration options, see the Reference table at the bottom of this page.
Basic configuration
Year | Location | Number of Arthur's Bakes | Status |
---|---|---|---|
2022 | London | 35 | Provisional |
2021 | Cardiff | 26 | Final |
To configure a column as a Resource attribute, specify the type
field as attribute
:
This minimal definition results in:
- the
label
field defaulting to the column title (Status
in this example); - the
required
field defaulting tofalse
- this means that csvcubed will accept a CSV file with empty cells in theStatus
column; - attribute values automatically being generated from the unique cell values in the
Status
column (Provisional
andFinal
in this example).
If all cells in the Status
column should be populated, set the required
field to true
. This will prompt csvcubed to flag to the user if there are any blank cells in the Status
column:
Label, description and definition
Additional details can be associated with the attributes in your data set through the label
, description
and
definition_uri
fields.
As mentioned above, the label
field will default to the column title unless explicitly configured in the
qube-config.json
file. In the example below, the Status
label is amended to Observation status
:
The description
field can be used to provide a longer description of your attribute. If you want to provide
information about your methodology, the description
field is the preferred place for this.
The definition_uri
fields allows you to refer to external resources that further define an attribute's values:
Attribute values
Rather than allowing csvcubed to automatically generate attribute values from the unique cell values in the Status
column, the values
field can be configured to specify a list of permitted cell values:
See the Attribute values page for more information on the configuration options available for the values
field.
Inheritance
To reuse or extend an existing attribute, the from_existing
field can be configured to refer to a URI defining the
attribute to be reused or extended.
To reuse a parent attribute without making any changes to it, set the from_existing
field to the URI defining the
attribute to be reused:
To extend a parent attribute and create a new attribute from it, set the from_existing
field to the URI defining the
attribute to be reused, and set the label
field to indicate that this is a new child attribute of
http://purl.org/linked-data/sdmx/2009/attribute#obsStatus
:
Attribute column templates
The Status
column could also be configured by using a column template - doing so means that the
type
, from_existing
and label
fields will be automatically populated based on the
observation-status
template:
Reference
This table shows a list of the possible fields that can be entered when configuring a Resource attribute column.
field name | description | default value |
---|---|---|
type |
The type of the column; to configure an attribute column use the value attribute (Required) |
dimension |
label |
The title of the column (Optional) | The capital case of the header in the CSV file with spaces replacing underscores |
description |
A description of the contents of the column (Optional) | none |
definition_uri |
A URI of a resource to show how the column is created/managed (e.g. a URI of a PDF explaining a list of attribute values) (Optional) | none |
required |
If this boolean value is true csvcubed will flag to the user if there are blank values in this column (Optional) | false |
values |
(New Resource Attributes only) If automatically-generated attributes are desired, a boolean value of true is used to signify to csvcubed to create Resource attributes from values in this column; otherwise this should be a list of attribute value objects defining the attributes used in the column. See the Attribute values page for more details. (Optional) |
none |
from_existing |
The URI of the resource for reuse/extension (Optional) | none |
from_template |
Use a column template (Optional) | none |
describes_observations |
Associates this attribute with the relevant observation values. This is only necessary for pivoted shape data sets with multiple observation value columns. See the Attributes page for details of how to configure this field. (Optional) | none |
cell_uri_template |
(Advanced) (Existing Resource Attributes only) Used to define a template to map the cell values in this column to URIs (Optional) | none |