Question about specifying @type as a collection name

[eecavanna]

Hi @dwinston, I'm sending this as a GitHub Discussion with the following quote in mind (from the office hours invite):

(2) updating our situational awareness to support subsequent office-hour Q&A and infra-sync agenda items. We will prefer to limit in-Slack responses -- even to 1:1 direct messages (DMs) or to personal @-mentions -- to briefly-qualified links to public GitHub issues

I took that to mean you generally prefer Q&A stuff like this happen on GitHub as opposed to Slack.

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I have a question about this code snippet in the validate_json function (in nmdc_runtime/util.py):

            if coll_name == "@type" and coll_docs in ("Database", "nmdc:Database"):
                continue

What is @type?

I see there are a couple reference to @type in tests/test_api/test_endpoints.py, where the author seems to me to want to ensure that the validate_json function handles it a certain way:

def test_metadata_validate_json_with_type_attribute(api_site_client):
    rv = api_site_client.request(
        "POST",
        "/metadata/json:validate",
        {"study_set": [], "@type": "Database"},
    )
    assert rv.json()["result"] != "errors"
    rv = api_site_client.request(
        "POST",
        "/metadata/json:validate",
        {"study_set": [], "@type": "nmdc:Database"},
    )
    assert rv.json()["result"] != "errors"

[dwinston]

@type is a special key for JSON-LD, used for JSON serialization of e.g. LinkML objects. That is, the value of @type lets a client know that the JSON object (a dict in Python) should be interpreted as a https://w3id.org/nmdc/Database.