Schema¶

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A JSON file inspired by JSON schema is used to describe the various agents, entities, and activities in SEIS-PROV. If a SEIS-PROV record is discovered it has to be validated against the scheme for that particular record. The JSON “schema” furthermore determines which types are valid SEIS-PROV types. It is a vital component of any program validating SEIS-PROV files.

Structure¶

At the top-level the file has a _metainformation key that determines the namespace and version of SEIS-PROV.

"_metainformation": {
    "format": "SEIS-PROV",
    "namespace": "http://seisprov.org/seis_prov/0.1/#",
    "recommended_namespace_prefix": "seis_prov",
    "version": "0.1"
}

Entities, agents, and activities are defined under the entities, agents, and activities keys. Each record is described by a JSON object adhering to this schema.

Download Record JSON Schema

We will illustrate this on the example of the multiplication activity as it is a very basic example. Keep in mind that the documentation is also build from this definition so everything will always be consistent.

{
    "package": "seis_prov",
    "type": "activity",
    "name": "multiply",
    "two_letter_code": "mp",
    "label": "Multiply",
    "description": "Multiply each value of the data with a certain factor. This is implied by many operations but sometimes useful to capture in its own right.",
    "other_seis_prov_attributes_allowed": false,
    "attributes": [
        {
            "name": "factor",
            "types": ["xsd:double"],
            "description": "The factor by which to multiply.",
            "required": true,
            "example_value": 2.5
        }
    ]
}

Each record definition has the following keys:

package: Which package this belongs to. Will always be seis_prov.
type: The type of record. One of activity, entity, agent.
name: The name of that particular record.
two_letter_code: Used in the id of each record.
label: Pretty version of the name. Will be the prov:label of each record.
description: An arbitrarily long description of the record which can contain restructured text.
other_seis_prov_attributes_allowed: Boolean indicating if the record can have attributes under the SEIS-PROV record aside from the ones defined for it.
attributes: A list of required and optional attributes for that record.

Attributes¶

Each attribute is again a JSON object, this time with the following keys:

name: The name of that record.
types: A list of allowed types as strings. The types are XML Schema types.
description: A description of that attribute.
required: A flag denoting if the attribute is required or not.
example_value: An example value for the attribute. This is only used to generate the documentation.
pattern: This is optional. If given the value of that attribute must match the given regular expression.