The "Direct Add" method is a rapid means of transferring data, which will not need to be used for any querying or comparison purposes, from a shapefile attribute table to a semantic net description
It is typically used to transfer data such as names of mapObjects (eg: New York; River Danube) which are useful for identification purposes, and which need to appear in any displayed or printed semantic nets. A LegendBurster attribute of type Free Text needs to be created in the Ontology Editor to hold such values.
Free Numeric data can also be transferred from shapefiles into semantic nets using this method (and, in this case, the numbers can be used in queries).
The following steps need to be followed to import Free Text or Free Numeric attribute values into mapObject descriptions:
Create the semantic net attribute of required type (Free Text or Free Numeric) in the Ontology Editor, using the "Create Attribute" function.
Set the field to be "directly added" to the mapObject descriptions to be the current field using the "Change Active Field in Shapefile" option from the "Actions" menu on the Main Menu bar.
From the "Actions" heading on the Main Menu, start the Map Object Net Editor, select the entity in the first mapObject's semantic net to which the attribute should be added, and click on the "Direct Add" button (shown on left). [In the example below, the shapefile field called "DEPOSIT_NA" is being directly added to the Free Text field "DepositName" as an attribute of the mapObject entity].
Note that, in the process of making "DEPOSIT_NA" the "current field" in the Word List Editor, it will have been imported in the projects database file. Once it has been directly added to the semantic nets, there is no reason to keep it in the database, and it can be removed, to save disk space, with the "Delete Current WordList" option in the Main Menu "Tools" drop-down list.