map-sse

Metadata Application Profile for the Social and Solidarity Economy.

This repository contains the source files for the MAP-SSE (previously referred to as DCAP-SSE). Until October 2016, these were maintained on a server at essglobal.org. A reason for moving them is to allow other people to get involved in the maintenance and development of the MAP-SSE.

• In October 2016 the primary home was moved to https://github.com/essglobal-linked-open-data/map-sse=
• In December 2020 primary home was moved to https://github.com/SolidarityEconomyAssociation/map-sse,
• Then in January 2025 the primary home was moved to https://github.com/DigitalCommons/map-sse,

This is now a Digital Commons Cooperative project. Please follow the contribution guidelines if you wish to participate.

Documentation sources

ESSGlobal RDF Vocabulary

ESSGlobal RDF Vocabulary - HTML source view.

TODO: add link to view in browser

ESSGLOBAL Technical Guidelines

ESSGLOBAL technical guidelines, July 2014.

This is a copy of the document on the ripess.eu site, retained here for safe keeping.

The Technical Guidelines document describes the reasoning behind the ESSGLOBAL vocab, and the thinking on how it is intended to be used.

Taxonomy overview

Each taxonomy describes a different facet of an SSE Initiative.

Taxonomy	Overview (English)	Linked Data definition
Products and services	Simple list	SKOS
Activities	Simple list	SKOS
Themes	Simple list	SKOS
Qualifiers	Simple list	SKOS
Type of labour	Simple list	SKOS
Legal form	Simple list	SKOS

Each of these is described in detail in the ESSGLOBAL technical guidelines.

Generating and deploying RDF serializations

There is a script for generating various RDF serialializations. For more information, see the documentation in BUILD.md in that directory.

Release versions

V1.0 (git tag v1.0)

Consists of .ttl, .rdf and .skos files copied from the essglobal.org server.

File type	Origin on essglobal.org
.ttl, .rdf	vocabs/vocab/v1.0
.skos	vocabs/standard

V1.1 (git tag v1.1)

Consists of .ttl and .rdf copied from the essglobal.org server.

File type	Origin on essglobal.org
.ttl, .rdf	vocabs/vocab/v1.1
.skos	unchanged

V2a (git tag v2a)

New Solidarity Economy Association context. Probably intended to be an alpha version 2, hence the unusual version format? (Note: the tag was added retrospectively to show the transition to the new version. A change in the line-up of the maintainers led to an inadvertant change in the process for representing the version.)

Major changes (partially inferred from the commit subjects):

• The makefile build was replaced with a Ruby script build (intended to simplify)
• The project was renamed from "dcap-sse" to "map-sse"
• Use the lod.coop Permanent URL redirector instead of w3id.org or w3id.solidarityeconomy.coop.
• New activities vocabs were added: Activities (Modified) and Activities (ICA)
• Various changes to the vocabulary terms.
• An HTML documentation snapshot added from essglobal.org.
• Content negotiation added.
• Deployment automation added.
• Bugfixes and documentation

V2.1 (git tag v2.1)

Updated to make a non-alpha release which supports the ICA's data. (Note: as before, this tag was added retrospectively.)

The ICA data we were using had two concepts of a "Country" associated with each organisation:

• The country in which an organisation's address was based
• The region in which an organisation's members were based

The latter was usually the same as the former. However, not always. It might be:

• Simply a different country entirely.
• Not a country - sometimes it was a larger domain than that: a region, a super-region, or global.

To support this, new vocabularies were introduced. Some of the new vocab files were generated from TSV files, which were easier to edit and manage.

Major changes:

• Use TTL as source format instead of RDF/XML (AKA .skos files, which are less readable).
• Add countries-iso vocab (ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes)
• Add regions-ica, super-regions-ica and territories-ica vocabs (defining ICA's definitions of a "region", "super-region" and "territories",
• To stay in line with ICA terminology (although note that the filenames remained the same), the following vocabs were re-titled:
  • "Activities ICA" became "Economic Activities"
  • "Base Membership Type" became "Typology"
  • "Organisational Structure" became "Structure Type"
• More translations, including (an intention for) full support for Spanish, German, French and English.
• Minor corrections, bugfixes.

V2.1.1

Note that this release was not made explicitly and the version remains 2.1. The tag v2.2.1 has been added retrospectively to show the transition, but the distinction is not yet "official". This would need to be done in future work by adding a target for this release.

The intention for this iteration was not so much to change the vocab, but to support a new ICA map for an ICA conference in South Korea that had Korean translations.

"Phrasetabs" were devised as a means to round-trip SKOS -> TSV -> XLS -> TSV -> SKOS. This was so that translations could be viewed and edited in a spreadsheet. A "Phrase table" is a TSV file which includes columns for "term" and "property", as well as a single non-localised value, and N localised values. This allowed the failthful preservation of the SKOS structure, in which each vocabulary term can have many properties, and each property is either not a localised value (like "altLabel") or localised (like "prefLabel"). TSV rows without a term were used to represent properties of the vocabulary as a whole, as opposed to a single term.

Major changes:

• Korean translations were added
• Phrasetabs added as a new representation format for vocabs, with scripts for the round-tripping process to and from TSV and SKOS (.ttl).

Note that the .ttl files remained the "source of truth", not the .tsv phrasetab files.

Use of branches in this repository

We are following exactly the process documented at http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/. Please make sure you are completely familiar with this process before making any changes here. As a consequence of following this branching model:

• The master branch is updated only on release
• The develop branch is the place to look for current activity.
• The develop branch is the default branch for this repository.

Note: when tagging in a local checkout, you must explicitly push tags up to the origin (just as for branches). See Git Basics -- Tagging.