EATS Schema Description

This document describes the EATS schema for those who use the system, rather than for developers.

EATS is fundamentally a way of making statements about entities. An entity can be pretty much anything; we have defined the following types: person, organisation, place, work (of literature, a piece of art, etc), and ship. A number of types of statements can be made about an entity, such as that it exists, that it has a particular name, or that it has some relationship to another entity. Each statement, or assertion, is composed of the following:

• the property (a name, existence, a relationship)
• the entity who is asserted as possessing the property
• a date or dates specifying when the property was held (optional)
• an authority record which identifies the record in an authority's system which asserts the property (optional)

So, instead of saying that there was a person who lived from 1901 to 1943 and was called Agnes Tomasi, EATS says the following:

• there is an entity, with a type of "person"
• this entity has two separate properties asserted about it:
  • an existence from 1901 to 1943
  • a name, Agnes Tomasi

If we had an NZETC key for that person, say "name-320475", then that would be represented in an authority record which specified an ID (the key) and an authority (NZETC). This authority record would then be linked to the property assertion that the person had an existence. If the name Agnes Tomasi was the name we had chosen as the authoritative name of this person, we would link that same authority record to the name property assertion.

If a second authority, for example the DNZB, also had a record for this person, this would be represented by a second statement of the person's existence, associated with an authority record for the DNZB entry.