Working with URIs
URI safe transformation
The URI safe transformation is a process which converts human-friendly text into an identifier which can be used as part of a URI. It is used to generate URIs to identify code list concepts, new units, new measures and new attribute values.
The process
Step | Example |
---|---|
The entire label is converted to lower case | Picard, Jean-Luc! is transformed to picard, jean-luc! |
Characters which are not letters, numbers, _ or / are replaced with a dash, - |
picard, jean-luc! is transformed to picard--jean-luc- |
Multiple dashes are replaced with single dashes | picard--jean-luc- is transformed to picard-jean-luc- |
A trailing dash is removed if present | picard-jean-luc- is transformed to picard-jean-luc |
Once this process is complete, the value is appended on to a URI base to make a full URI, for example picard-jean-luc
may be appended to http://example.com/definitions/code-lists/enterprise-captains/
to identify Jean-Luc Picard within the code list defining Enterprise captains.
http://example.com/definitions/code-lists/enterprise-captains/picard-jean-luc
.
CSV column name safe transformation
The CSV column name safe transformation converts a human-readable column name into an identifier that is safe to use as the name
property in a CSV-W column.
The process
Step | Example |
---|---|
The entire column name is converted to lower case | Confidence interval - lower bound (95%) is transformed to confidence interval - lower bound (95%) |
Any characters which are not letters, numbers or _ (underscore) are replaced with a single _ |
confidence interval - lower bound (95%) is transformed to confidence_interval_lower_bound_95_ |
The transformed column name can then be safely used by csvcubed in the generation of CSV-W metadata, such as column definitions: