Keynote panel

Before the Web arrived in 1994, metadata was about physical items, collected in buildings; catalog records captured information from their title pages and summaries of their aboutness. Machine-readable representations in formats such as XML and MARC specified the structure of those records as documents. Since the 2000s, metadata is increasingly expressed in RDF, a language for making simple statements about things in the world in a uniform structure that machines can use to more easily merge data from multiple sources. This talk focuses on the deceptively simple problem of describing, in metadata, the role and affiliation of people who contributed to creating scholarly resources such as this conference talk. The simplicity of the task is deceptive because the affiliation and role of a given contributor is specific to the creation of one specific resource and should ideally be distinguishable from less contextually-bound information such as names and ORCIDs. XML and MARC formats record role and affiliation in forms that require detailed document schemas to extract. RDF descriptions are independent of specific record structures but may follow expressive styles ranging from the very simple and flat (eg, Dublin Core) to the very complex and expressive (BIBFRAME). A new DCMI Scholarly Resources Application Profile (SRAP) lies in the middle of this spectrum from flat to nested. SRAP mirrors descriptive patterns that have been re-invented across several modern standards. Tools and formalisms today can bridge differences of models and granularity to enable practical interoperability in a complex world where no "one best way" will ever meet all requirements.