Week from Oct 19 to Oct 25

Introduction

During the twelfth week, I made some breaking changes to the code of oc_ocdm which lead to the publishing of a new major release 2.0.0. A lot of methods had their names changed and a set of boolean flags was added to the GraphEntity class. Moreover, I had to think about the implementation of new “delete”, “merge” and “import_from_graph” operations applied to GraphEntity instances, which will be concretely done next week.

Report

Methods with new names

With respect to the changes already done last week, a lot of methods had their names changed, following the a rule which says that only those methods that add/remove rdf:type related triples should have a name starting with create_:

• BibliographicReference:
  • from create_annotation to has_annotation
  • from create_content to has_content
• Citation:
  • from create_citing_entity to has_citing_entity
  • from create_cited_entity to has_cited_entity
• DiscourseElement:
  • from create_title to has_title
  • from create_content to has_content
  • from create_number to has_number
• ReferenceAnnotation:
  • from create_body_annotation to has_body_annotation
• ReferencePointer:
  • from create_annotation to has_annotation
  • from create_content to has_content
• PointerList:
  • from create_content to has_content
• BibliographicResource:
  • from create_title to has_title
  • from create_subtitle to has_subtitle
  • from create_pub_date to has_pub_date
  • from create_number to has_number
• ResourceEmbodiment:
  • from create_starting_page to has_starting_page
  • from create_ending_page to has_ending_page
• ResponsibleAgent:
  • from create_name to has_name
  • from create_given_name to has_given_name
  • from create_family_name to has_family_name
• GraphEntity:
  • from remove_entity to remove_every_triple
• ProvEntity:
  • from create_generation_time to has_generation_time
  • from create_invalidation_time to has_invalidation_time
  • from create_update_query to has_update_action
  • from create_description to has_description

Newly added flags to the GraphEntity class

A new Python module called entity_flags.py was written, defining a class containing some important flags that will come in handy next week when I’ll be working on the implementation of “delete”, “merge” and “import_from_graph” operations. Here’s a list of those flags with an explanation of their meaning:

• is_a_new_entity
  It’s used to know if the considered entity is a new entity (it still doesn’t exists) or not. If a “new entity” gets stored anywhere on a persistent support, than it’s no more considered as “new” and the flag value will become False.
• preexisting_graph_was_loaded
  It’s used to know if the field preexisting_graph of the considered entity was initialized with a graph provided by the user to the GraphEntity’s constructor.
• to_be_deleted
  It’s a flag which is settable by the user in order to mark the considered entity as to be deleted from the persistent storage or not.
• was_merged
  It’s set as True if at least one “merge” operation is performed on the considered entity. In such a case, a field containing the list of other entities with which these operations were done (a field which is currently missing) should be kept inside the GraphEntity instance.