Scalar 2 User's Guide

Lenses and Metadata

Several lens options, including the “Filter by metadata...” filter, the “A-Z” sort, and the “String match count” sort, allow you to target specific metadata fields to check for the presence (or absence) of a bit of text you specify. In both cases, you're presented with “Select ontology” and “Select field” drop-down menus to choose the metadata field you want. But how do you know which items to choose to target a particular field?

Targeting metadata fields

To understand how Scalar metadata works, it helps to see it in action. You can do this by navigating to any page or media item in a Scalar book and clicking the "Metadata" link in the footer. This will take you to a table displaying all of the metadata for the current item, in which each row corresponds to a field.

The left-most column of the table displays a more friendly name for the field, while the middle column shows its machine-readable id in the format [ontology]:[field]. To target a specific metadata field is a matter of making selections from the “Select ontology” and “Select field” menus that match the machine-readable id. So for example, to target the body content of a page, listed under the id “sioc:content”, you would choose “SIOC” from the ontology menu, and “content” from the field menu.

Here are the ontologies and fields for some of the most frequently used metadata items, for reference:
 
Scalar propertyOntologyField
TitleDublin Core (dcterms)title
DescriptionDublin Core (dcterms)description
Body contentSIOCcontent
Creation dateDublin Core (dcterms)created
URL (for media)Artstor (art)url

This page has paths:

This page references: