Jenn Riley, the metadata maven for Indiana University, recently released a visualization of over 100 metadata standards related to cultural heritage and their relationships within the various communities and with other standards.
The message announcing these new metadata resources states, in part:
Each of the 105 standards listed is evaluated on its strength of application to defined categories in each of four axes: community, domain, function, and purpose. Standards more strongly allied with a category are displayed towards the center of each hemisphere, and those still applicable but less strongly allied are displayed along the edges. The strength of a standard in a given category is determined by a mixture of its adoption in that category, its design intent, and its overall appropriateness for use in that category.
The standards represented are among those most heavily used or publicized in the cultural heritage community, though certainly not all standards that might be relevant are included. A small set of the metadata standards plotted on the main visualization also appear as highlights above the graphic. These represent the most commonly known or discussed standards for cultural heritage metadata.
Seeing all of these standards in one place can be rather overwhelming, and it can take some study to really parse what the diagrams are attempting to depict. The main diagram measures a huge 3 by 9 feet, rendering it unprintable for normal humans. Even moving around it on a large monitor can be a challenge while still trying to read the text.
I’m also not sure what benefit listing such foundational standards as XML, XML Schema, XPath and XSLT adds to it. But overall I think it is an astonishing effort, and one that I think with some feedback and fine tuning could be a useful resource for trying to gain a better understanding of the various metadata standards appropriate to various cultural heritage communities.
Also, the “Glossary of Metadata Standards” (particularly the “pamphlet version,” which renders it as an 18-page standard letter-sized document), is not to be missed for anyone wanting the brief lowdown on any of the 100-plus acronyms.
If you’re involved with metadata in cultural heritage work I would definitely suggest you study these materials and provide feedback to Jenn. She has already revised it based on feedback, and I’m sure she would be open to more if it can improve it in a way that will make it a foundational document for those laboring in this field.
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Yes, please provide feedback! This was certainly a fun project to work on.
My rationale behind including the foundational standards (as you call them) is I know a whole lot of folks in these areas when talking about metadata standards say “but where does XML fit into all of this?” (for example). There’s often a perception that XML is somehow an alternative to, say, MARC, rather than a tool to be used to create metadata languages. I figured this visualization could help answer those sorts of questions.
I originally planned to have a pamphlet version of the visualization as well, but ran out of design money. My skills lie in areas very far from design work, but I was lucky enough to get a small grant to get at least this much done and also lucky enough to find an excellent designer (Devin Becker) to produce this very beautiful thing.
(And I know I left OWL off. That was an accident. Bad Jenn. That “oops that should be on there” list is already growing.)