[DDI-ADG] spreadsheets w/additional notes

[Katherine McNeill-Harman]

I went through the Geography and Time spreadsheets and have added my notes 
to column G (remember, we'd given everyone until the end of the day today 
to get theirs in, in preparation for our phone call tomorrow AM).

I went through and refined some phrasing, as well as added more description 
where I thought it'd be helpful.  My notes in column G are intended to 
replace the original ones in column F (rather than add to them; I added 
where I intended that).  As we discussed, others can (maybe you're in 
process right now) revise this and add their comments to other columns).

In doing this, I have the following questions/comments for the group:

Geography
1) Thinking through and documenting the issue we talked about in line 4 
(where Description could say that the study covers 3 countries, each of 
which has its own Geography > GeographyValues > GeographyName), I realized 
that line 5 needed to be rewritten b/it implies that Geographic Coverage 
will be described by only one geography.  So I broadened it.  I assume the 
"which can also be distinguished by a Geography which does not have a 
ParentGeography" would apply to each of the 3 coverage-related instances of 
Geography in the 3-country scenario.  This relates to line 13.

2) Line 18: Hate to bring up a substantive issue at this late date (some 
are just occurring to me when really reading through the descriptions), but 
I'm not clear on what's required w/in this group.  Is it true that they 
could choose among lines 19-25 (have to put at least one, but not all)?  If 
this is the case, then we'd lose the machine-actionability of the values 
(b/the author could choose just to put in a GeographyName and not a 
GeographyCode).  I think that I recall that we wanted authors to always 
insert a code for a geography, but we would (in line 20) give them the 
option of pointing to an external code list (rather than having to document 
each code using line 24).  Therefore I would think that at minimum lines 21 
and 23 should be required.  Does this make sense.  Is this what's needed to 
ensure machine-actionability?

Time
1) Line 29, AccessRestrictionDate:

a) First I'm not sure if a controlled vocabulary for user categories is 
feasible.  I think it depends upon how we think it'll be applied:
i) very generally (public, subscriber, author)
ii) might it be used for managing internal documents before they're 
released? (e.g. the names of groups could commonly be proper names (e.g. 
the name of a department or research group), therefore infinite).
If i I think yes, if ii I think no.  So I put in a general phrase about it 
at the end.  Since Jostein is on the SRG, I say if we're not sure, pose it 
as a question to them and know that he'll have input (rather than spending 
much more time on it now).

b) Also on this element, I assume it'll be repeated for different user 
categories and it can be applied at any level down to the variable.  I put 
a note to this effect, but maybe someone w/a better XML eye can check and 
make sure the other columns in the spreadsheet reflect these features.

2) At the bottom we had a note to ourselves "Note - we need to investigate 
time attributes in the variable class - Is the format sufficient to 
describe the format of a time variable?"  Have we already done this?  Maybe 
now's not the time, but if something is undone, we should include a note in 
the spreadsheet w/a question to the SRG.

3) Do any of the lines 22-27 need notes?

___________________________________________
Katherine McNeill-Harman
Data Services Librarian
Dewey Library for Management and Social Sciences
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue, E53-100
Cambridge, MA 02139
mcneillh at mit.edu
617-253-0787 
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