Metadata

VALEP uses a relational database as well as parsing tools that enable a restrictive use of certain special metadata. A persons, for example, can be identified as the author of a document, only if the person is already stored in VALEPs table of persons. A date is only accepted by VALEP if it is specified in accordance to the socalled EDTF format. On the other hand, (almost) all free text metadata categories enable the usage of the whole range of Unicode symbols in VALEP, e.g. Hong Qian can be alternatively spelled as 洪谦.

Special metadata

Date

Date and time is specified in VALEP using all levels of the highly flexible Extended Date Time Format ([EDTF]) - see the detailed specification their.

• To specify a simple date use the Year-Month-Day format, e.g. 2020-12-02
• For a range of dates use / between the dates, e.g. 1900-12-24/1900-12-31
• Entire months and years can be specified in an obvious way as 1932-10 (= October 1932) and 1968

Location

For locations we are using a powerful internal tool, which is based on the specification of hierarchical structure of areas that can be recently edited only by the Admin. Each city must be located inside of an area. A concrete address, then, is always based on a city.

Area

Areas are hierarchically structure. This means two different things.

• Main areas specified as nested boxes, e.g. Lower Austria is inside of Austria, Austria is inside of Europe, therefore Lower Austria also belongs to Europe but because Austria does not belong to Asia, Lower Austria also is not a part of Asia.

List of metadata being used in documents

• Enum specifies a metadata category where the user must choose one value from an internal predefined list
• Name means that the user needs to choose a data set from the table Name that can be edited in the admin section
• Date and Location need to be specified, according to the rules being described above
• Unicode (X) means that the user can specify text using the whole range of Unicode symbols; the text is limited to X characters
• Simple (X) means that the user can specify text only by using a restricted set of characters that include [A … Z] [a … z] [1 … 0] .,;:-+=*/\~#@§$%!?&(){}[]<>|^°´`‘“

0. Document Category Enum
1. Title Unicode (300)
2. Title (alternative long) Unicode (1,000)