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3. Cube Designer
The goal of Cube Designer is to
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add the necessary metadata around the initial cube, which is either resulting from the latest cube transformation or an imported cube from another system. The metadata is used by visualize.admin.ch tool and further for the automated publication to opendata.swiss.
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to verify all data was correctly imported and if there is any missing information.
For projects created from CSV files, the cube, displayed as a table, is the result of the transform operation based on the defined Cube table (observation table) in the CSV Mapping step. Each observation being a table row.
Per cube we have metadata on the level of the cube itself, which also signifies its own dataset in the database and on opendata.swiss once published. Further is it crucial to complete the metadata per dimension, to make it possible that external users and visualize.admin.ch can interpret the content of each dimension.
With the 🖊️ icon to the right of the cube title, you can access the Metadata of the cube / dataset. The fields have descriptions to give you hints on the content. Mind that you can also open other projects to compare if you are unsure about the usage of the fields.
Specify the details for every dimension inside your cube with the 🖊️ icon for each dimension (presented as a column).
Each dimension should provide a fitting name describing the content of the table. For Key Dimensions this comes mostly naturally as it is the class of the entries. (E.g. Cantons for Berne, Zurich, ...).
For the Measurement Dimensions it is important to also provide a defining name on the values provided. (E.g. population, temperature, spending). Even if often clear in the context of a cube, do not use generic names like values, measurement, count. Also it is possible to have multiple Measurement Dimension in one cube, therefore it will be necessary to distinguish them by the name.
The description allows for a full sentence and potentially more detailed information on the content of the dimension.
### Languages
You should add names and descriptions for the legal languages and English. Metadata fields should in most cases be provided in multiple languages. Every language is added as a new string with a separate language tag.
The dimension type is a crucial setting. It can be already provide by the imported cube, or the identically named property in the CSV Mapping. It is possible to overwrite in the Cube Designer. They help to correctly interpret the data.
The Measurement Dimension provides the data, values or the observations in the cube. They are mostly integer or decimal, but can also be ordinal or even nominal concepts.
A Key Dimension will be used to construct the filters to select a specific slice in the cube for the visualization.
The Scale of Measure helps to classify the nature of information of a Dimension.
Most Concepts are of nominal nature. They can be named but not put in a natural order. (E.g. cantons, colors, woods)
If a Concept can be put in an order (E.g. big, medium, small or urgent, normal, low-priority) they are of the ordinal nature. It is important that concepts with ordinal nature provide a schema:position on the concept table to provide a machine readable order.
The values of Measurement Dimensions are in general of the interval or ratio nature.
It signifies that the difference between values (E.g. temperatures in celsius: 10°C, 20°C, 30°C, or dates: 2001, 2002, 2003 or directions from north: 10°, 20°, 30°) are proportional. But you can't state that 20°C are double of 10°C or that the year 2000 is double of the year 1000.
If Measurement Dimensions are of the types mass, length, duration, plane angle, energy and electric charge or similar, or also temperature in kelvin. The zero point has a significance and we can state that 2kg is twice 1kg.
If in doubt between interval and ratio, choose interval.
Every Measurement Dimension needs to provide a Unit. The Cube Creator provides an extensive list based on QUDT of units from which you can chose.
Please make sure that you select:
- Number (#) for counts and statistics
- Percent (%) for percentages
Missing units can be ordered by creating an issue.
Only nominal and oridinal concepts can be mapped to Shared Dimensions. Therefor you need to first make sure that the Scale of Measure is selected for a dimension. Once this is done a 🔗 symbol shows up in the row header. Clicking the 🔗 will show a dialog which allows to select a Shared Dimension and map the input values to the concepts in the Shared Dimension.
The second purpose of the Cube Designer is to manually inspect the correctness of the imported data.
You can manually check:
- Check if the cube is complete (all data was converted)
- Check that the links to other tables are correctly transformed. Each one of those values can be clicked to display the details.
- Check if all languages are present. This can be done by changing the language on the top right, and verify all concepts.
- Check if all metadata is added and translated for all languages for the Dataset/Cube and for each Dimension.
It is technically possible to provide two different texts with the same language, but it is not recommended, as the end-user application might randomly decide which one to use.