We have removed the word "Dataset" in Central and replaced it with "Entity List." This means much of the text related to Entities will need to be translated again and we would greatly appreciate your help doing this before the next release in two weeks.
When updating text for French, I copied the previous translation and then only had small edits to make.
I found it generally easier to express the concepts using "Entity List" rather than "Dataset" and I hope you will too! (@mathieubossaert and other French speakers, feel free to make edits or discuss in this thread)
You should not feel like you have to literally translate "Entity List". In particular, if your language does not have a convention of capitalizing words to make concepts stand out, please don't match capitalization. In French, the most comfortable translation I found is closer to "list of entities."
We decided to make this change after many demos and conversations about this functionality. We initially believed that the very genetic word "Dataset" would be an asset but the feedback we've received is that it was difficult to connect meaningfully to "Entities." We previously had a broader view of what "Datasets" might do in the ODK world and we also thought we would differentiate more between Entities that are the subjects of forms (e.g. a tree you're collecting data about) and lists of values that act like metadata (e.g. a list of counties that trees could be located in). We now believe that focusing on lists of Entities no matter how they're used will make the concepts more approachable.
We will make a companion change to XLSForm to alias list_name
in the entities
tab to dataset
. Forms that use dataset
will continue working without any change.
These text updates are only end-user-facing. We will continue using dataset
in the form specification, the Central API, and the internal Central implementation. We will update corresponding documentation to make it clear that end-user-facing systems in the ODK world use "Entity List" for this concept. Any other software that implements the specs could choose to continue using the more generic "dataset" or introduce other specialized language like "register", "task list", etc.
Thank you!