References overview

References allow you to link any entity (incl. statement) in the database to an external source of knowledge and a specific part of it.

Use

You will find them useful in two main ways:

• documenting the evidential basis of your claims (accountability), and
• connecting your data to external resources such as gazetteers or authority files (interoperability).

Any entity can carry any number of references.

Structure

A reference is a pair of two values: a Resource (any entity of the type Resource) and a part specifying the relevant segment of that resource — for example, a page number in a source edition, or an identifier in an external location list.

How to remind users to use References

As the owner of the instance, you can impose the addition of a Reference, or a Reference to a specific Resource, to entities in Global validations. For instance, you might want to trigger a warning when a Concept or an Action is not referenced to WordNet. Owner-role users can do this in the Global validations.