Semantic ontologies in KoBo

It’s not in the pipeline, but I’ll pull in @tinok and @ignacio_gr. With any new feature like this, we need to understand:

  1. Who is going to do the work? Ultimately, unless you maintain a fork—which is nobody’s preference—the core team will have to review the changes and merge them into the main KoBo repositories, but perhaps most of the UX and coding could be done elsewhere. This depends on what resources are at your disposal, e.g. design/technical labor vs. funding. The first task is clarifying the requirements and estimating; then, there’s the further work of fine-tuning UX design, doing the software development, and testing.

  2. What’s the user experience going to be like? I think this summary gets the basic idea through clearly enough:

    While creating a form in the form builder, each question in the form is semantically annotated. This semantic information is saved along with the form. When the final data is exported, this semantic information is also attached to the data.

    …but we have to work through the details of how this will be presented in the form builder, and how it can be made useful to the largest audience. Can we allow for arbitrary tagging of questions? Can we take this opportunity to improve our treatment of HXL, which currently can only be specified in XLSForm? What are the exports going to look like: is this for XML exports only? (Currently, we don’t really have an XML export mechanism the way we do for XLSX or CSV; we basically just cough up the XML submissions as they were received from the client, i.e. Enketo or Collect).

  3. How do we build it, and how long will it take? Which code changes are needed and where? Does this affect the shared XLSForm or XForm specifications that are maintained by the larger ODK community that extends beyond KoBo?

These are questions we’d answer together, but perhaps, @khansaifmohd93, you could give an idea of your thoughts regarding (1) to begin. This is the best place to discuss the details of any new feature, but if you’d like a more private venue to discuss the business aspects, then you are welcome to write to info@kobotoolbox.org.

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