Contributors should consider how important a relation is to discovery, and not create relations that will not improve access. In particular, although the RDA Registry allows parties to be related, this should be used only to improve discovery. A relation between a person (researcher) and a group (funding organisation) may add value, while hierarchical relations between organisational parts may not.
Registry objects can be linked to a related collection, party, activity or service in one of two ways:
- using an Identifier in the RelatedInfo element, OR
- using the Key of an (existing or new) related RegistryObject in the RelatedObject element.
As Research Data Australia is primarily a collections registry, it is preferred that a RegistryObject be created to describe collections. However, consider whether you need to create a RegistryObject for parties. Research Data Australia treats parties linked via RelatedObject or RelatedInfo in almost exactly the same way: the indexing and display of names are equivalent; however, an advantage of using RelatedObject is that reverse links are generated from the Party Object, allowing all collections related to that Party to be displayed when a Party name is clicked on (this functionality will hopefully be available with RelatedInfo links in a future release). The advantage of using RelatedInfo is that it is the simplest (and most sustainable) way to link parties to collections, activities and services with a globally unique persistent identifier (preferably an ORCID).
Whichever option is chosen, contributors are strongly encouraged to provide a globally unique identifier such as a DOI, ORCID or PURL in their records. Identifiers support a linked data approach that enables relationships between resources to be identified and displayed in Research Data Australia regardless of the source of the record.
It is possible to create multiple relations for a single object. For example, a party may be related to a collection as both manager and owner. Multiple relations for a single object should be provided in a single instance of the RelatedObject element. See the XML encoding examples below for details.
See Relationships between registry objects for information on how the RDA Registry can automatically create relationships between objects, and bi-directional links between related objects.
| Code Block |
|---|
| language | xml |
|---|
| title | Part of a party record, showing the key of the related collection and the party's relation to that collection (isOwnerOf) |
|---|
|
<relatedObject>
<key>hdl:102.100.100/999999</key>
<relation type="isOwnerOf"/>
</relatedObject> |
| Code Block |
|---|
| language | xml |
|---|
| title | Part of a collection record showing the key of a related party and the collection's relation to that party (isOwnedBy) |
|---|
|
<relatedObject>
<key>http://nla.gov.au/nla.party-549576</key>
<relation type="isOwnedBy"/>
</relatedObject> |
| Code Block |
|---|
| language | xml |
|---|
| title | Part of a collection record showing the key of a related party and the collection's multiple relations to the party (isManagedBy ; isOwnedBy) |
|---|
|
<relatedObject>
<key>http://nla.gov.au/nla.party-549576</key>
<relation type="isManagedBy"/>
<relation type="isOwnedBy"/>
</relatedObject> |
| Code Block |
|---|
| language | xml |
|---|
| title | Part of a collection record showing a collection's multiple relations to its parent collections (isPartOf) and its child collection (hasPart) - "nested collection" |
|---|
|
<relatedObject>
<key>Collection26</key>
<relation type="isPartOf"/>
</relatedObject>
<relatedObject>
<key>Collection28</key>
<relation type="isPartOf"/>
</relatedObject>
<relatedObject>
<key>Collection29</key>
<relation type="hasPart"/>
</relatedObject> |
Change history
| Expand |
|---|
| title | Click here to view... |
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|
| Date | Change history |
|---|
| April 2010 | Consultation draft | | 26 Oct 2010 | First web publication | | 25 Jan 2011 | Relation information for services added | | 18 July 2011 | Information about inferred bi-directional links added | | 21 Nov 2011 | Information about creating primary relationships | | 5 Dec 2011 | Minor clarifications to descriptions of relation types | | 4 May 2012 | Correction, added collection-to-any relation isAssociatedWith, previously omitted in error | | 20 Nov 2012 | PrincipalInvesigator relation type added | | 8 April 2013 | Information about multiple relations added | | 15 May 2013 | Information about nested collections added | | 26 Nov 2013 | Information about expanded use of relatedInfo added to best practice section (RIF-CS v1.0.5) | | 26 Nov 2015 | Updated definitions of hasCollector and isCollectorOf introduced with Release 18 | | 5 July 2017 | Content completely revised and updated. Updated relatedInfo vs relatedObject best practice guidance. Primary and bi-directional links info, and detailed relation explanations moved to new Research Data Functionality and Display page. | | 20 June 2018 | Updated relatedInfo vs relatedObject best practice guidance. | | 14 Aug 2018 | Added information about graph display of relations in RDA (Release 28) |
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