Foundation 01 · Canonical records

Name the subject
before the system.

Machine-readable work begins with a stable, inspectable record for a real subject. Its route, name, fields, sources, and owner need to be clear before metadata or discovery files can say anything useful about it.

Learning boundary. This lesson explains an editorial and technical record-design method. A canonical route does not establish identity, control a crawler, produce a knowledge-graph entry, rank a page, or require a model to treat a record as authoritative.

Learning objective

Build a public record that people can inspect and systems can reference.

By the end of this lesson, you should be able to define the subject, canonical route, material fields, source links, change boundary, correction route, and accountable recheck owner for a public entity record.

01 · Subject

What entity or concept does this record name?

Use a precise name and scope. Do not combine a company, product, framework, person, and outcome into one ambiguous object.

02 · Route

Where is the maintained public record?

Choose one public URL for the record. Link related routes with their specific relationship rather than treating every page as an equivalent identity statement.

03 · Fields

Which statements are documented, and by what source?

Keep factual fields narrow and source-linked. Label a proposed category, interpretation, or maintained framework instead of presenting it as an independently established fact.

04 · Maintenance

Who corrects it when the world changes?

Record a review date, update trigger, accountable owner, and correction route. A stable URL without a maintenance path can become a stable source of stale information.

Practice lab

Reduce five conflicting bios to one inspectable record.

A technical project appears on a homepage, a social profile, a repository README, a conference talk, and a search snippet. The versions use different names, launch dates, scope statements, and links. None identifies a current owner or a correction route.

  1. Write the one-sentence subject definition that the record can responsibly support.
  2. Choose a canonical public URL and identify which other routes should link to it.
  3. List the fields that need source links, dates, and scope boundaries.
  4. Define what change would require a recheck and how a reader can propose a correction.

Source shelf

Study identifiers and relationships before implementation.

  1. W3C JSON-LD 1.1Read the specification’s treatment of identifiers, contexts, and graph relationships. It describes a data serialization mechanism; it does not define a specific site’s identity or public claims.
  2. W3C RDF 1.1 Concepts and Abstract SyntaxUse the basic subject–predicate–object model to examine whether a record’s relationship statement actually names the subject, relationship, and target it describes.

Continue the pathway

Next: express the
relationship.