California Digital Library (CDL) and Dryad recently announced a partnership to address researcher needs and to “move the needle” on digital data adoption throughout the scholarly research community by working together to understand and respond to researcher needs for high-quality scientific data publishing infrastructures.
Metadata records are high-value information hubs that connect users to related resources in journals, books, and on the web.
The Doe family consists of mother Jane and her son John. Identifying people and relationships is an important function of metadata. The ISO TC211 metadata standards provide a comprehensive framework for many important metadata use cases. Could ISO metadata be used to describe the Doe family? ISO metadata describes objects with types and properties.
The idea that the language we use to talk about things shapes the way we think or can think about those things has been around since the 1800’s and even has a name, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, proposed during 1954.
Many datasets and products are documented using approaches and tools developed by data collectors to support their analysis and understanding. This documentation exists in notebooks, scientific papers, web pages, user guides, word processing documents, spreadsheets, data dictionaries, PDF’s, databases, custom binary and ASCII formats, and almost any other conceivable form, each with associated storage and preservation strategies.