Display name for dimensions

[danfowler]

Currently, measures, dimensions, and attributes of a dimension are "named" via their keys which are understood to be internal references for use in an implementation, but not necessarily intended to be displayed for humans. FDP has no way of presenting a "display name" for either a dimension, attribute of a dimension, or measure. Dimensions should have some way of specifying a human-readable display name for presentation to the user in an implementation. As an example, the dimension "administrative-classification" below could have a title attribute with a value like "Administrative Classification".

"model": {
  "dimensions": {
    "administrative-classification": {
      "title": "Administrative Classification",
      ...
    }
  },
  "measures": {
    ...
  }
}

See https://github.com/openspending/os-viewer/issues/63#issuecomment-181451034

[rufuspollock]

I thought we already had "title" as a recommended field :-)

If not, definitely agree we should add it (similar to title we have for JSON Table Schema).

[akariv]

+1

What's currently missing is the display name for dimension as a whole (esp. if it spans multiple columns).

For attributes, we should probably define that in case the title attribute is missing then the title attribute from the JTS in the resources section will be used instead as fallback (only applies when the attribute is resource bound - n.a for constant attributes etc.)

[rufuspollock]

OK i've updated the title of this issue to better reflect what it is about since it is just about labels for dimensions.

@akariv when do you need the dimension title for users?

@akariv on your point re fallback to resource title I agree though it seems one is straying into implementation details that maybe should be in an implementor's tutorial vs in the spec.

Implementation

Unfortunately the fact we made dimensions attributes a "dict" directly on the dimension mean that adding the title is going to be a bit painful. Any suggestions for how we would do this? (Obviously we could just reserve title as a word and not allow any attribute on a dimension to be called that but sort of ugly).

[akariv]

As an example we might have a po-date dimension with title Date of Purchase and day, month and year attributes.
I would like to be able to show the actual dimension title with the attribute titles to the user, and never show the internal identifiers - e.g. Date of Purchase (Year) instead of po-date/year.

As for implementation:

1. as all attributes are located under the attributes property in each dimension, so adding a sibling title property shouldn't create any ambiguity.
2. My fallback comment was just to point out that there is some duplication here, but I agree it's an implementation detail and not part of the spec.

[pwalsh]

Moving to frictionlessdata/datapackage-fiscal#3