Adding or installing new hierarchies

Hierarchies as thesaurus are an important area of Dédalo system. Dédalo use hierarchies in multiple scenarios, as normalized toponymy, languages, thematic, materials, techniques, etc. Adding or installing new hierarchies is and will be a important maintenance process.

Defining hierarchy

Hierarchies are a complex structure of data with multiple relations formats, as his name defines, data will structure hierarchically with parent-children relation, Dédalo support more relations types as equality, change to, equivalence, or other relation types.

By default all hierarchies sections are a clone of the hierarchy20 section. But is possible use any other section adding the relations and definition to create a hierarchy with any flat section.

Hierarchies are showed inside the Thesaurus area and they are viewed with a tree representation.

What is the difference between hierarchy and thesaurus?

Hierarchies are the structure of the data and the thesaurus will be the data itself, the data entered by users or imported. Any thesaurus has a main controlled that is defined into Dédalo ontology (as an expansion of the ontology) and this definition is named hierarchy.

In other words; Hierarchies are the meta information of the thesaurus.

Creating new hierarchies

Is necessary to identify two different hierarchies types:

• Common and shared hierarchies
• Private hierarchies.

Common or shared hierarchies

Every hierarchy has a unique TLD that identify it and is used into Dédalo ontology as a specific section with his own configuration. To create or import a common or shared hierarchies you will need to know the TLD before open the new hierarchy.

In some hierarchies this TLD use a standard denomination, as toponymy hierarchies, that use the ISO 3166-1 definition to identify the countries.

Some common and shared TLD's: (list ordered by type and antiquity)

Hierarchy	Description	type	section	TLD
Thematic	Themes used to analyze heritage	Thematic (1)	hierarchy20	ts
Onomastic	Names of people and places	Thematic (1)	hierarchy20	on
Chronological	Periods and time events	Thematic (1)	hierarchy20	cr
Deposition type	Defines the different Deposition types of donations in register	Thematic (1)	hierarchy20	deposit
Object name	Defines the different names for objects	Thematic (1)	hierarchy20	object
Inscriptions and measures	Defines typologies of inscriptions and his ubication into the object	Thematic (1)	hierarchy20	pieces
Culture	Defines different cultures and his space and time	Thematic (1)	hierarchy20	cult
Material	Defines the composition materials used in objects	Thematic (1)	hierarchy20	material
Technique	Defines the techniques used to build objects	Thematic (1)	hierarchy20	technique
Iconography	Defines iconography	Thematic (1)	hierarchy20	icon
Languages	Languages families and dialects	languages (3)	hierarchy20	lg
Users roles	Defines the different roles of Dédalo users	Semantic (4)	hierarchy20	roleusr
Users jobs	Defines the different jobs for people	Semantic (4)	hierarchy20	rolejob
Position role	Defines the different position role for persons	Semantic (4)	hierarchy20	rolepos
Northern Paleo Hispanic	Defines Iberian symbols not defined into Unicode	Epigraphy (7)	hierarchy20	scxibo
Southern Paleo Hispanic	Defines Iberian symbols not defined into Unicode	Epigraphy (7)	hierarchy20	scxibm
South-Western Paleo Hispanic	Defines Iberian symbols not defined into Unicode	Epigraphy (7)	hierarchy20	sctxr
Greek	Defines especial symbols not defined into Unicode	Epigraphy (7)	hierarchy20	scell
Latin	Defines especial symbols not defined into Unicode	Epigraphy (7)	hierarchy20	sclat
Punic	Defines especial symbols not defined into Unicode	Epigraphy (7)	hierarchy20	scxpu
Symbols	Defines symbols	Epigraphy (7)	hierarchy20	scsym
Countermark	Defines symbols used as countermarks	Epigraphy (7)	hierarchy20	icon
Special	Defines a restrictions for indexation	Special (5)	hierarchy20	special
Ubication	Topographic, to identify the location of objects	Ubications (9)	hierarchy20	ubication
Places	Defines places as findspots	Ubications (9)	hierarchy20	place
Web sites	Website structure, menus, etc	websites (6)	hierarchy20	ww

TLD's names

The first hierarchies created were toponyms, and this hierarchies followed the ISO TLD's Alpha 2 to use as Dédalo ontology TLD. Some of the first common hierarchies follow the ISO Alpha 2 rule, as thematic hierarchy, that use ts as TLD, by the time, it became impossible to create new ontologies following the Alpha 2 rule, so, the Alpha2 rule was removed and now Dédalo can use a longs TLD's, but following some rules: For this historical reasons no spaces, especial characters, numbers, points, commas or any other characters outside ASCII characters are valid (as accents, ç, ñ, etc.). To create hierarchies TLD's, only [a-z] characters are accepted.

Private hierarchies

Is possible to create hierarchies by your own, alone for other Dédalo installations. In this case you will need to use a specific TLD following the rule of use only letters, without spaces or special characters.

Normally, the hierarchy reference will be hierarchy20, the normalized section used as thesaurus model.

Process to create new hierarchy

Both, common and private, hierarchies has the same process to be created.

1. Go to Hierarchy section in the Thesaurus menu.

   

2. Review if the TLD exists previously doing a search.

   

3. If not exists, create new record as any other section.

4. Add the new TLD into the TLD (Alpha2) field.
5. Add the main language of the hierarchy
6. Mandatory Set the Typology of the new hierarchy
7. Mandatory Set the real section tipo (normally hierarchy20)
8. Mandatory Add the name of the hierarchy

9. Change the state of the field "Active" to "Yes"

   

10. Open the tool to create the new hierarchy, the tool is locate into the inspector.

    

11. Build it clicking in the "Generate" button.

    

12. Check in Thesaurus that this hierarchy is ready and set the permissions to users as you need.

    

Toponyms

For simplified the creation and load toponymy hierarchies is possible use the Maintenance panel to control the all toponyms hierarchies.

Dédalo installations will pre-configure all counties, but their are not active and his data is not loaded by default. Only countries loaded in the install process will be accesible to users. To activate new one follow this steps:

1. Go to "Maintenance" panel in "System administration" menu.

2. Locate the "Install hierarchies" block

   

3. Check the country that you want to load. (Is possible check more than one)

4. Click the "Import hierarchy" button and wait. (Some countries may have a large dataset)
5. Check in Thesaurus view that this hierarchy is ready and set the permissions to users as you need.