Designing a metadata vocabulary

This proposal is very much a work in progress. You may not find anything useful in here yet.

This is a meta-proposal, documenting the process of constructing a small metadata vocabulary for the documents and references that make up this hypertext. The goal of this document is to make tractable the aims laid out in SEP 60: A stricter metadata vocabulary.

I’ll be drawing heavily on the US Library of Congress MODS system and, to a lesser degree, the MADS system. See the links at the bottom of this page for further reading.

My intention in the

A metadata vocabulary.

1686653385.#3261M390671128P163708V65024I9218159.locus,S=11814:2,RS

Among other things this system is an extension of an abiding curiosity of mine, that of linked data and semantic analysis. “This simple idea…remains largely unrealized”¹.

While being rooted in a practical context of use, this system adopts an explorative posture that might be summarised as follows.

Consciously unconcerned with stability. This vocabulary is for me, and I reserve the right to make breaking/incompatible changes. This is in contrast to the hypertext interface of this site, where I place a high prize on stability and consider that interface a human API. I do envision this volatility as being time limited however, as I mean for this to underpin a collaborative body of work, engaging with the inherently generative quality of the collective

While tags in collaborative tagging systems serve primarily an indexing purpose, facilitating search and navigation of resources, the use of the same tags by more than one individual can yield a collective classification schema.

— Lucia Specia; Enrico Motta, Integrating Folksonomies with the Semantic Web, The Semantic Web: Research and Applications. ESWC 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 4519, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, p. 624–639, 2007

Not afraid to retread old ground, nor to repeat other systems mistakes. Coupled with the freedom to make breaking changes, this permits a pattern of rapid and wide ranging iteration.

Types of metadata

There are three substantive types of metadata:

Descriptive Metadata: Information that helps identify and locate data (e.g., title, author).
Structural Metadata: Information about the organization of data (e.g., file structure).
Administrative Metadata: Information regarding data management (e.g., rights, access).