Preparation
Haplo represents all of the elements in your organisation by creating a record for each one. You can then store and share details of things in your organisation, search and find them, and see how different things link together to understand how things interconnect within your organisation. To do this, you first need to create a map of your organisation, which will be used to form the schema for your system.
Begin by identifying the different elements, or Types, in your organisation. These could be files, people, organisations, events, news, projects, or whatever you need to represent in the system.
Once you have identified your Types, list the sub-types for each Type. For instance sub-types of File maybe accounts, audio, brochure, contract, image, minutes, newsletter, presentation.
Each Type of item, will be described using attributes to make it easier to find. Consider the Attributes with which you would like to describe each Type you have identified. For instance the attributes of a File might be Title, Author, Subject, Client, Project etc. List all the attributes for all the types you’ve identified. An attribute can be used for more than one Type.
Consider if any of these Attributes require qualifiers to enable their description to be more specific. For instance the attribute Telephone number, might have qualifiers for mobile, home, office.
The rest of the setup manual will describe how to represent the elements of your organisation in Haplo.
When to create a type
Sometimes it may not be straightforward to decide when something should be a Type or a subtype of another Type. Consider whether it is necessary to create a new Type:
- will this item always only be uniquely this particular type? ie an organisation will always only be an organisation, but a client may also be a supplier (an item can only be of one type, but can be of multiple sub-types.)
- will this item remain permanently this type of item? ie a organisation will remain permanently an organisation, but a client may become a supplier instead of a client.
- would it be useful to have this type of item identified separately? ie is there a genuine benefit to having word documents appear as a separate type to spreadsheets? (document format icons (pdf, excel, word) are already displayed in the search results)
- does your organisation hold enough of this type of item to warrant a separate type?
Objects
Haplo’s default attributes are based on Dublin Core with qualifiers. You can use a different schema by defining your own attributes. The only special attributes are Type and Title.
An object must have at least one Type defined. This may or may not be exposed in the user interface.
An object must have at least one Title. The first Title is used when displaying links to the object and sorting alphabetically. If the “name” of the thing you’re describing does not necessarily make sense as “title”, you can alias the Title field to a more suitable attribute name, for example, Name when describing people.