What to do with a very specific field from a museum?

[chin-rcip]

Some of the museums having a very specific collection, like the Potato Museum in O'Leary (Prince Edward Island), or the Vancouver Police Museum, in Vancouver (British Columbia).
Those museums may have very specific fields in their database (potato specie, or kind of criminal) that would obviously not be modeled in CHIN Target Model.

The question is: How should we deal with this kind of information? Would it be just not modeled in AC and CiC, or should we add those fields in the model? If we decide to incorporate that specific data, we should have a kind of miscellaneous field that would encompass those fields without having to create different pattern for each cases encountered.

[KarineLeonardBrouillet]

Maybe we could function like Nomenclature and have a form to submit new fields to be modelled. That way the Vancouver Police Museum, for example, could submit a proposal for a Judicial field to be added to the Life Events category with different types such as accused, accuser, jury, etc. and CHIN could assess whether it is relevant to model it specifically or just create a miscellaneous field. Or we could offer the miscellaneous field, but generate lists of potential fields to add and review them periodically.

[Habennin]

As I would understand it, as CHIN you don't have to worry about it. It will be difficult enough already to do the integration on the fields that you have decided to do integration on.

You cannot model the whole world

[illip]

+1

During the mapping process, we should keep track of the fields/information that we were not able to handle properly. If it's a frequent field, we might decide to model it.

If it's just a question of vocabularies, I would encourage the museum to work on SKOS vocabularies for their field of expertise.

I don't think a miscellaneous field would be useful...