Funding for Agri-food Data Canada is provided in part by the Canada First Research Excellence Fund
Using the new urn:said
Built into the Semantic Engine are SAIDs (Self-Addressing Identifiers), a form of content-derived identifier. Rather than assigning an arbitrary identifier to a resource, a SAID is calculated directly from the content itself. Because the identifier is derived from the content, any change to the content produces a different identifier. Within the Semantic Engine, every OCA…
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Naming Without Spaces
In research data management, small decisions about naming can have outsized consequences. One of the simplest—and most important—best practices is to avoid spaces when you are assigning names. While spaces may seem harmless and human-friendly, they often create problems when data is processed, shared, or analyzed across different tools and systems. The Semantic Engine for…
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Expanding Data Standardization with the Entry Code Library
Maintaining clean, consistent data remains one of the biggest challenges in data management. Entry codes—also known as picklists—have long played a key role in improving data quality by standardizing how information is captured. Building on this foundation, a new Entry Code Library feature has been introduced in the Semantic Engine schema writer, making it easier…
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The Value of Historical Ag Data
Uh-oh here she goes again! I’ve been pondering the direction I wanted to take with this post – do I dig more into the data opportunities that may exist in the OAC Annual reports? or twist my Rubik’s cube to look at a different facet of this ongoing conversation. Let’s look at another facet. You…
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The Case for Uploadable Form Data
The Case for Uploadable Form Data: A More Flexible Approach to Online Submissions Anyone who has worked extensively with online submission systems will recognize a familiar frustration: you have done the hard work of gathering, drafting, and refining your content – often collaboratively, across multiple documents and tools – and now you face the tedious…
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AI this and AI that – will it ever end?
Wow! Isn’t it amazing how our world can change in an instant? Remember not that long ago when AI was an up and coming “thing” but not yet a mainstream facet of our research lives? Now it seems everything is about AI or has some AI component to it. I’m not saying that it’s a…
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Global recognition of SAIDs
Content-Derived Identifiers in the Semantic Engine Built into the Semantic Engine is a particular kind of identifier called a SAID (Self-Addressing Identifier). Unlike traditional identifiers that are assigned to a resource, SAIDs are derived directly from the content itself. They are computed—typically using cryptographic hashing—so the identifier is intrinsically bound to the exact bytes of…
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To preserve or NOT to preserve data?
That is the question to ask – when it comes to historical research data. So – yes I found some of the original research data that was collected by OAC researchers back in 1877 – BUT… do we spend the time and resources into pulling it out of the PDFs and making it accessible to…
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Data Entry Rescue
Imagine this scenario. On her first field season as a principal investigator, a professor watched a graduate student realize—two weeks too late—that no one had recorded soil temperature at the sampling sites. The team had pH, moisture, GPS coordinates… but not the one variable that explained the anomaly in their results. A return trip wasn’t…
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Historical Research Data Management?
In my last post OAC and Historical Ag Data – has the 150 year old mystery been solved? I ended with a couple of highlighted statements made by the Wm. Johnston, who was the rector/president of OAC back in the early years (1874-1879): conduct experiments and publish the results lay his hands upon our results…
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