DPUB IG Metadata Task Force Report Published

The Digital Publishing Interest Group has published a Group Note of DPUB IG Metadata Task Force Report. The Metadata Task Force of the DPUB IG found, through extensive interviews with representatives of various sectors and roles within the publishing ecosystem, that there are numerous pain points for publishers with regard to metadata but that these pain points are largely not due to deficiencies in the Open Web Platform. Instead, there is a widespread lack of understanding or implementation of the technologies that the OWP already makes available for addressing most of the issues raised. However, some of the very technologies that are little used or understood in most sectors of publishing are widely used and understood in certain other sectors (e.g., scientific publishing, libraries). Priorities that have emerged are the need for better understanding of the importance of expressing identifiers as URIs; the need for much more widespread use of RDF and its various serializations throughout the publishing ecosystem; and the need to develop a truly interoperable, cross-sector specification for the conveyance of rights metadata (while remaining agnostic as to the sector-specific vocabularies for the expression of rights). This Note documents in detail the issues that were raised; provides examples of available RDF educational resources at various levels, from the very technical to non-technical and introductory; and lists important identifiers used in the publishing ecosystem, documenting which of them are expressed as URIs, and in what sectors and contexts. It recommends that while little new technology is called for, the W3C is in a unique position to bridge today’s currently siloed metadata practices to help facilitate truly cross-sector exchange of interoperable metadata. This Note is thus intended to provide background and a context in which concrete work, whether by this Task Force or elsewhere within the W3C, may be undertaken.