I was talking with my old friend John Kunze a little while back and he described a project that he is involved with called “Yet Another Metadata Zoo” or yamz.net. In a world of more ontologies than you can shake a stick at, it aims to provide a simple, easy-to-use mechanism for defining and maintaining individual metadata terms and their definitions.
The project explains itself like this:
The YAMZ Metadictionary (metadata dictionary) prototype…is a proof-of-concept web-based software service acting as an open registry of metadata terms from all domains and from all parts of “metadata speech”. With no login required, anyone can search for and link to registry term definitions. Anyone can register to be able to login and create terms.
We aim for the metadictionary to become a high-quality cross-domain metadata vocabulary that is directly connected to evolving user needs. Change will be rapid and affordable, with no need for panels of experts to convene and arbitrate to improve it. We expect dramatic simplification compared to the situation today, in which there is an overwhelming number of vocabularies (ontologies) to choose from.
Our hope is that users will be able to find most of the terms they need in one place (one vocabulary namespace), namely, the Metadictionary. This should minimize the need for maintaining expensive crosswalks with other vocabularies and cluttering up expressed metadata with lots of namespace qualifiers. Although it is not our central goal, the vocabulary is shovel-ready for those wishing to create linked data applications.
If you have a Google ID, signing in is dead simple and you can begin creating and editing terms. You can also vote terms up or down, which can eventually take a term from “vernacular” status (the default for new terms) to “canonical” — terms that are considered stable and unchanging. A third status is “deprecated”.
You can browse terms to see what is there already.
I really like this project for several reasons:
- It’s dead simple.
- It’s fast and easy to gain value from it.
- Every term has an identifier, forever and always (deprecated terms keep their identifier).
- Voting and commenting are a key part of the infrastructure, and provide easy mechanisms for it to get ever better over time.
What it needs now is more people involved, so it can gain the kind of input and participation that is necessary to make it a truly authoritative source of metadata element names and descriptions. I’ve already contributed to it, how about you?