YAMZ (pronounced "yams") is an open vocabulary of metadata terms from all domains and from all parts of "metadata speech". That will be exciting the more about metadata you know.
In brief, with no login required, anyone can search for and link to terms. Login to create and edit your terms, and to comment on others' terms. Community guidelines help make the metadictionary a high-quality cross-domain metadata lexicon that is directly connected to evolving user needs.
Almost every software project needs controlled vocabularies for interacting with users. Effort that goes into devising a set of terms for a search interface, a dropdown pick list, a form for entering data, etc. involves researching, consensus building, and communicating. YAMZ provides a platform for you to take advantage of prior work and to share your own new or divergent work with others, whether you are one developer making UI design choices or a large working group creating a formal ontology.
Maintaining and developing international standards is normally an expensive, inefficient, design-by-committee process producing results that are out-of-date as soon as they are published. With the metadictionary, change will be rapid and affordable, driven by practitioners and active testers. There will be no need for panels of busy experts to convene and deliberate. We expect dramatic simplification of vocabulary evolution compared to traditional methods. Before YAMZ, it was hard for one group to learn about the efforts of another group, which has resulted in a large number of overlapping, conflicting vocabularies. YAMZ is not the first crowdsourced metadata dictionary, but as a shelter for living, changing machine-readable terminology, it is not unlike Yet Another Metadata Zoo.
The hope is that users – people creating and receiving machine-readable descriptions of objects they care about – will be able to find most of the terms they need in one place namely, the metadictionary. One vocabulary, one namespace. This should reduce the number of namespaces and the expense of maintaining crosswalks with other vocabularies. And the vocabulary is completely ready for linked data applications, each term having its own permalink (an ARK identifier).
Across YAMZ there are three disjoint term classes. Classification is ongoing and fully-automated, based on voting and user reputation.
Metadata is structured information for describing things we care about. It looks like text with extra punctuation to mark different regions, and elements and values within those regions. That structure makes the information readable by software, which in turn helps us organize, manage, analyze, and discover things we care about.
Real computational power comes when there is wide agreement on metadata terms, such as element names and the values they take on. The goal of YAMZ is to support finding, creating, and achieving community accord on high-quality terms. These are the terms that you and others will use to create high-quality metadata. Unlike a regular dictionary, the metadictionary is therefore about terms used to create structured (machine-readable) information.
The metadictionary supports data too. Like metadata, data is structured information, but with a shift in emphasis away from being about a particular thing. Some people say there's no important difference between data and metadata.
Metadata looks like a group of assertions about a particular thing, such as a document. For example, metadata may assert that a given document's title is X, its author Y, and its publication date Z.
It's not always obvious what thing a metadata assertion is about. Term definitions often refer to it with a word like "thing", "resource", or "object". Thus a "title" element might be defined as "a name given to the resource". Which exact "resource" won't be found in a term definition but is revealed elsewhere in the metadata or by context. For example, metadata embedded in a JPEG file is usually assumed to describe an image embedded in the same file, and a metadata record often has a special place to hold an identifier for the object being described.
Lots of terms define metadata/data elements, which are small categories of information, such as "title", "author", or "response". An element might also be a structured statement that itself contains other elements. A "location" element might contain "latitude" and "longitude" elements. Other elements are meant to take on metadata/data values, for example, pieces of text or personal names.
Terms help identify metadata/data values, especially when they are limited in some way. For example, a "response" element might be one of "yes", "no", or "maybe". A "count" element might take an infinite number of values, but always restricted to "integer".
All YAMZ content – terms, definitions, examples, illustrations, etc. – are dedicated to the public domain under the terms of the CC0 license. The source code for the metadictionary is available on Github as a Python package under a BSD open source license. Full API documentation is also available.
We welcome developers and analysts to help us improve YAMZ. If you have interests and skills in metadata standards, database service and schema design, or YAMZ core technologies (currently Postgres, Python, Flask), please let us know via the github repo above. Sometimes there are internships available as listed here.
YAMZ was initially developed in 2013-2014 by the Metadata Working Group of the NSF-funded DataONE initiative. Working group members were John Kunze (chair), Jane Greenberg (chair), Christopher Patton (lead developer), Karthik Ram, Greg Janée, Nassib Nassar, Angela Murillo, Sarah Callaghan, Rob Guralnick, and Tim Robertson. Since then enhancements have been made by Dillon Arévalo, Mark Phillips, and Chris Rauch, with support from the Digital Library Federation (DLF), the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP), the Wilson Center, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and especially the Drexel University Metadata Research Center.