2009-03/Leap2A categories

Belongs to the 2009-03/Leap2A specification – see also 2010 developments

This page specifies the predefined categories applying to some 2009-03/Leap2A types. Systems may also devise and publish their own categories.

The Atom category element is used to represent these. For example, one could use:  or in full, without CURIEs, 

The recommendation is to have the scheme and term concatenating to give a URL that focuses the browser on the definition of the term in a page for the scheme.

leap:label should not be used here, as Atom's own label is defined for this use. The meanings of atom:label and leap:label are identical, but need to be separated to keep tools happy.

Thus http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/2009-03/Leap2A_categories/learning_cycle#Experiencing leads to the definition of Experiencing within the learning cycle, and there one may find alternative common terms for reference and comparison.

audience
See 2009-03/Leap2A_categories/audience

The default value is "Shareable".

This scheme exists to ensure that any items marked "Private" in a system can be exported with a clear marker to that effect.

N.B. "Shareable" does not imply that the items are actually shared, and in particular does not imply they are public.

check
See 2009-03/Leap2A_categories/check

There is no default value.

This acts simply as a well-defined way of answering yes or no.

common item
See 2009-03/Leap2A_categories/common_item

There is no default value.

There are a few items which are common to several systems, but not obviously easy to mark in other ways. This category scheme is here to enable these to be distinguished unambiguously.

The most likely use is with entries.

learning cycle
See 2009-03/Leap2A_categories/learning_cycle

There is no default value.

This allows categorization along the lines of Kolb's learning cycle, or equivalent concepts. It is suited for used with entries in particular.

life area
See 2009-03/Leap2A_categories/life_area

The default value is "Unclassified".

This classifies the area or areas of life with which the item is associated. It includes the obvious distinction between education, work and leisure, and adds several more in an attempt to have good coverage, so that there is no temptation to invent related categories covering similar ground.

It seems suitable for classifying achievements, activities, entries, meetings, plans, and possibly other things.

person type
See 2009-03/Leap2A_categories/person_type

This is recommended for person items.

If there are any items of type person, and the person type category is not used, there must be a way of being completely clear about who the portfolio holder is. There are two options for this that do not use the person type category.
 * If there is only one item of type person, it should relate to the portfolio holder.
 * The feed author uri sub-element can point to the person entry of the holder.

priority
See 2009-03/Leap2A_categories/priority

This provides for a numerical scale of 1 to 5 where 5 is the highest priority. It seems appropriate for plans and possibly activities

If no priority is given for any item, the relative priorities cannot be assumed. If a priority is given for some but not other items, then the items without an explicit priority should be assigned priority "3".

readiness
See 2009-03/Leap2A_categories/readiness

The default value is "Ready".

The scheme exists to allow draft items, as for instance can occur in many blogging systems, to be represented in the "Unready" category.

resource type
See 2009-03/Leap2A_categories/resource_type

This classifies the kind of resource that is referred to.

The default value is "Unclassified".

selection type
See 2009-03/Leap2A_categories/selection_type

This classifies the kind of selection. It is recommended that a selection type category is given to entries of type selection.

If the selection category is not given, then
 * if the selection item author is the holder,
 * if the content type is html or xhtml, the category should be interpreted as "Webpage";
 * if the content type is text, or the content is empty, the category should be interpreted as "Blog";
 * if the selection author is not the holder, the category should be interpreted as "Grouping".

SWOT
See 2009-03/Leap2A_categories/SWOT

There is no default value.

This allows categorization along the lines of this well-known scheme. It is suited for used with entries in particular.

Plain tags
If a tag is a simple text label, not explicitly defined anywhere, then it has no scheme. An entry can be associated with any number of terms without a scheme. Use or  Use a label if the desired label has space or punctuation, and put a normalised version into the term, to allow for systems where tags are space-delimited.

Externally-defined categories
Anyone can define their own category schemes locally.

Here is a tongue-in-cheek example of a category scheme for illustration. Please look at the source of that page! The key features are that the scheme URI resolves to a page giving the scheme as a whole, and on that page, each term has its own div element with id equal to the term value, where that term is defined.

To categorise Leap2A for instance, you might want to use something like  which gives you a URI for the term within the scheme, even though you wouldn't actually see this in Leap2A: http://www.simongrant.org/web/specscheme#nice

As in this example, the Leap2A specification recommends local schemes to be defined using XHTML, so that the terms can be viewed easily by an ordinary browser, rather than as an Atom category document (from the Atom Publishing Protocol). Atom category documents may also be used, but ideally should be associated with a stylesheet that makes them easily readable by a browser. Any other XML formats for category schemes, e.g. IMS VDEX, should also ideally be associated with a stylesheet for ease of viewing with a browser.

General notes
The atom:category structure has a scheme, an term and a label. Importing systems should be able to process the following categories: Importing systems may, but are not required to, process categories from schemes defined locally by partners. They may reasonably represent terms from these schemes as terms without a scheme.
 * from the schemes defined above to cover significant shared practice in the partner institutions
 * without a scheme
 * in this case, the tag should be interpreted as a user-defined tag such as in Flickr, del.icio.us, etc.

Term attributes are mandatory and definitive, while label attributes are optional, and can be used to record any label which is not identical to the term, either allocated by the host system or the user.

Pre-defined term names are given an initial capital letter to aid human visual distinction from other constructs. User-defined term names may or may not have an initial capital.

Use of CURIEs
It is recommended to adopt a CURIE approach. For the suggested namespace, "categories", define xmlns:categories="http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/2009-03/Leap2A_categories/" alongside other namespace declarations in the feed element and e.g.  inside the relevant entry.