Tables, charts and datasets

libbie
Hello,
I am a data archivist and I would like to help my users create Zotero libraries about data resources from tables, charts and datasets. To do this I would like to have the option of sleecting those as "types" in the pull down box of the Info section. There are bibliographic citation options for each of these information formats. For example, here is a citation for a data set:

Bratton, Michael, Robert Mattes, Annie Barbara Chikwanha, and Alex Magezi. AFROBAROMETER: ROUND 2.5 SURVEY OF SOUTH AFRICA, 2004 [Computer file]. ICPSR04702-v1. South Africa: AC Nielsen South Africa [producer], 2004. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2007-12-18.

The component parts are Title, Principal Investigators, Producer(publisher), Distributor, Place of production, place of distribution, date, language, short title, URL and so on.

Is this something that could be added in to Zotero or can you show me a way to set this up for my users?
Many thanks,
Libbie
  • cmrukcom
    I would like to do the same thing - use zotero for archiving datasets and graphs - any news about new resource types or ways to extend your own resource types locally.

    thanks for a great tool,

    Phil
  • Tjowens
    What kinds of fields do you need for this beyond the fields available in something like document.
  • cmrukcom
    I am asking a general question as part of a zotero appraisal process.

    Sure it might be possible to force almost every type of published material into the type 'document' but then we appear to have the ever so subtle distinction between 'magazine' article, 'newspaper' article and 'encylopedia' article.

    The point is that the fields for dataset and graph are clearly quite different for all the different variants of 'article'. For example it is common to have a field for 'Sample under test' or 'device under test' when referring to a set of data taken with a standard procedure.

    At the crude end of the spectrum it seems surely possible to define a type called 'user type' that has fields 'specific user type' and 'user parameter field' 1,2,3 etc...

    At the sophisticated end of the spectrum it would also seem possible to define a type called 'xml defined type' that makes reference to a local xml file, which itself is defined via a referenced xsd file.
  • bdarcus
    edited September 23, 2008
    At the crude end of the spectrum it seems surely possible to define a type called 'user type' that has fields 'specific user type' and 'user parameter field' 1,2,3 etc...
    As I said in another thread, this is so crude as to be useless. This kind of solution only really works adequately if you're dealing with a single user, with a single database, who doesn't really care to collaborate or move their data.

    But Zotero is designed as a multi-user tool, and for social network-like collaboration. And I, for one, never want again to be putting my data in an application that I cannot easily extract and use in other contexts.
    At the sophisticated end of the spectrum it would also seem possible to define a type called 'xml defined type' that makes reference to a local xml file, which itself is defined via a referenced xsd file.
    Zotero does not rely on XSD. It uses a relational database for storage, and RDF as primary import/export format.

    It so happens that RDF is by design robustly extensible, so there is indeed technical room to do this right. I suspect the main challenge is to do with the interface; where you need a way for a user (maybe via some standard config files) to map URIs (how RDF names thing in a global context) to user-oriented labels (e.g. what the user actually sees in Zotero). This prototype might provide some hints on how to do this.

    So I agree this would be nice, and it IS doable. But it's not easy to do it right.
  • cmrukcom
    edited September 29, 2008
    For data interchange to work there needs to be a protocol accepted across a population - which could be the entire world as bruce seems to suggest here. But that need not be so - one can conceive of data formats that can be used in conjunction with local protocols that allow zotero to be used as a data archiving tool for local communities.

    It appears that zotero already has special interest forums for lawyers and social scientists so it cannot be long before experimentalists and data-archivers like libbie will be looking to use zotero in conjunction with the proposed integration of MIT's exhibit.
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