Looking for New Year’s metadata resolutions? How about: Stop using sentences that include the words “minimum metadata” without specifying a use case. Sentences that include the words “minimum metadata” come up frequently in metadata discussions, usually in the context of what a data provider wants to provide or, even more common, in the context of what should be expected of them.

Martin Fenner from DataCite recently described the benefits of some standardization of sources for vocabularies used for three DataCite metadata elements: language, rights, and subjects. All of these elements: can play important roles in the dataset discovery and selection processes at DataCite are implemented using shared vocabularies that are identified by associated Scheme elements, e.g. subjectScheme, and are optional.

Last October I pulled together a list of organization names that occur multiple times in the ROR database. These non-unique organization names represent the most extreme case of the essential problem that RORs are trying to address, ambiguous affiliations.

Version 4.3 of the DataCite Metadata Schema released during August, 2019 included (among other things), the capability to provide persistent identifiers for affiliated organizations in the metadata (Dasler and deSmaele, Identify your affiliation with Metadata Schema 4.3, 2019). This capability builds on the work and enthusiasm generated by the ROR Community that has championed the concept of open organization identifiers for several years

The scholarly communications and open science communities are getting excited about the benefits of metadata that includes persistent identifiers for organizations. Now that an open registry of organizational identifiers exists, the community is facing two adoption challenges: 1) evolving metadata dialects to include identifiers and 2) implementing them in existing and future metadata.

A quick post about non-unique ROR Organization names. Many groups are interested in augmenting their affiliation metadata with RORs and it seems that a list of organization names is the right input to that process... Alas, we know that affiliations are a swamp filled with gotcha's. It turns out that an unexpected (really?) number of organization names resolve to multiple RORs. Actually, almost 800 of them!

This post was first published on the DataCite blog on September 27, 2019. Since Wilkenson et al., 2016 introduced the FAIR Principles, discussions and implementation guidelines have been published in almost every possible context.

Last summer John Chodaki challenged me to develop something fun for a Metadata2020 presentation during the FORCE18 meeting in Montreal. I have always enjoyed games, so a collaborative game that could engage teams in the metadata creation process seemed like a natural candidate. There were many metadata geeks and lots of ideas about what such a game would look like.

In my last blog I introduced Metadata Archeology with a description of digging around in Crossref metadata for affiliations associated with authors of work published in the Dryad Data Repository. I showed how the Crossref Participation Reports could be used for an initial survey of Crossref metadata like satellite images are being used in the GlobalXplorer project to find ancient sites in Peru.

One of the interesting challenges encountered in the migration of Dryad metadata technology into the California Digital Library is the identification of organizations associated with the research data archived in the Dryad Repository. This information is not included in the original Dryad metadata, so digging around for it, i.e. “metadata archeology”, is required.

I recently introduced a simple visualization of data from the CrossRef Participation Reports that provides quantitative insight into how completeness of CrossRef metadata collections with respect to eleven key metadata elements has changed between the backfile and the current record collections.