ReDIF Person templates, generated by RAS/ACIS. What’s new

Status: proposal. Initial version: 2004-01-22 14:09.

With introduction of ACIS, the structure of person records changed. The ReDIF Person templates, that ACIS-based RAS will write, will be different from those, generated by HoPEc.

Summary

First new feature of the new person templates is that they will be in UTF-8 Unicode encoding. Consequently, content of a template may fall out of latin-1 charset and, thus, the template may become unusable for latin-1-based user services.

Second, richer name data structure is now available.

Third, email address was obligatory in old person templates. That is not true anymore.

Forth, new attributes introduced. Purpose: to carry new personal data that might be collected or generated by ACIS.

Unicode

Each ReDIF Person template file has UTF-8 BOM (Byte-Order-Mark) at the first byte position of the file.

ReDIF-perl will recognize that and treat all the files' content as UTF-8 data.

Personal name

Attributes:

Name-First: required
Name-Middle
Name-Last: required
Name-Prefix
Name-Full: required
Name-Latin: optional. Will contain the English-spelled person’s name, when Name-Full has any non-english letters.

All these attributes are non-repeatable.

New attributes

Short-ID:

Required and non-repeatable.

Short-ID attribute will contain short unique persistent alphanumeric identifier of the person record. Will be calculated and maintained by RAS/ACIS software. It is assumed to never change. At least as long as the record handle is not changed.

Short-IDs of personal records always start with the “p” letter.

Short-IDs shall be treated as case-insensitive.

Workplace-Organization:

Optional and repeatable. Value type: institution handle. Meaning: person’s affiliation with the specified institution.

This attribute will replace Workplace-Institution attribute, which caused confusion with the same attribute as part of Workplace-(ORGANIZATION) cluster.

Other attributes

Interests:

Optional and non-repeatable. Value type: freetext. Meaning: Research interests of a person. Format: words or phrases separated by a new-line character “\n”.

Photo-URL

Optional and non-repeatable. Value type: URL. Meaning: address of the picture file, depicting the person.

Registered-Date:

Optional and non-repeatable. Value type: datetime, format: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS Z, where Z is the time-zone as <sign>hhmm — hour and minute offset from GMT (e.g. “+0200”).

Ed.Note: For some reason this attribute is not generated now. To be fixed.

Reserved attributes

Last-Login-Date:
Last-Modified-Date:

Directory structure and file names

Personal templates comprise RePEc archive “RePEc:per”. Its structure will change for manageability.

By previous convention (was it Guildford protocol?), personal data files are archived in “pers/” directory.

There will be two levels of directories below “pers/”: a level for each of the first two letters of the short-id of the personal record, the initial “p” not counted.

Each file will be named as follows: short-id + “.rdf”.

So file of a personal template with short-id “pwa34” will reside in “pers/w/a/” directory and it’s full pathname will be “pers/w/a/pwa34.rdf”.