The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 3rd Edition

8.5. Key Points in Chapter Eight

• We can approach the problem of how to form resource descriptions from two perspectives: structuring and writing.

  (See §8.1, “Introduction”)

• Metamodels describe structures commonly found in resource descriptions and other information resources, regardless of the specific domain.

  (See §8.2, “Structuring Descriptions”)

• Blobs, sets, lists, dictionaries, trees, and graphs are all kinds of structures that can be used to form resource descriptions.

  (See §8.2.1, “Kinds of Structures”)

• A list, like a set, is a collection of items with an additional constraint: their items are ordered.

  (See §8.2.1.3, “Lists”)

• A dictionary, also known as a map or an associative array, is a set of property-value pairs or entries.

  (See §8.2.1.4, “Dictionaries”)

• Nested dictionaries form a tree.

  (See §8.2.1.4, “Dictionaries”)

• Trees consist of nodes joined by edges.

  (See §8.2.1.5, “Trees”)

• JSON consists of two kinds of structures: lists (called arrays in JavaScript) and dictionaries (called objects in JavaScript).

  (See §8.2.2.1, “JSON”)

• The XML Infoset is a tree structure, where each node of the tree is defined to be an information item of a particular type.

  (See §8.2.2.2, “XML Information Set”)

• Using schemas to define data representation formats is a good practice that facilitates shared understanding and contributes to long-term maintainability.

  (See §8.2.2.2, “XML Information Set”)

• The RDF metamodel is a directed graph, so it identifies one node (the one from which the edge is pointing) as the ...